What information does an image bare?
Does it speak about a formal truth? About a state of transformation, which is often characterized by layers and marks or translucent forms that reflect underlying colors and signs.
And what does it reveal about its current state? About the truth it contains and the mechanisms of its construction, which often find themselves positioned between reality and illusion – and located in its formation.

LINN LÜHN is especially pleased to present Isthmus in formation, an exhibition with 14 new works by Hudson Valley-based (NY, USA) artist Sean Sullivan.
Resulting from a process located between painting, drawing, and monoprint, Sullivan’s (b. 1975, Bronx, NY) works on Japanese print-making paper create a dense yet playful world of abstract forms and layers that highlight failures as beautiful irritations. As inner architectures which are softly troubled by geometric shapes in yellow, pink, brown, grey, and red color that equally echoes the traces of 20th-century design traditions, early abstract Modernism, as well as historic printmaking techniques.
Oil stick transferred to paper through a hybrid process located between drawing and printmaking here questions the idea of a fixed, error-free process of image creation and visualizes the resulting image as something in formation. A reservoir of sublime visual poetry that ignores, synchronizes, and manipulates its marks only to reunite them – much like a beautiful vague memory – in new and mesmerizing ways.

Sullivan’s works on paper determine their own truth. A world that marvelously resists classification and that uses its formal vocabulary of pink suns, green square-like shapes, and light blue dots to intertwine, overlap, or re-form their multilayered meanings into (mis-)information. Into ambivalent symbols of an own shimmering reality.

Philip Fernandes do Brito