Sean Scully moved to New York in the mid-1970s, where the combined influences of Minimalism and Op Art resulted in meticulously executed works that confuse the distinction between figure and ground to dazzling effect. In the early 1980s, he shifted to a more humanizing approach that imbues abstraction with elements of emotion, ­autobiography, and metaphor. While the relationship between the horizontal and the vertical remains central to these vibrant and sometimes melancholic later paintings, the works consciously take on connotations beyond those of the rationalist grid, such as the horizon of the landscape and the presence and varying form of the human body. They also continue to blur the line between background and surface, whether through processes of layering and folding, embedding one image within another, or solid blocks of black that create the impression of openings or holes. For his TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition, Scully swapped the surface of the canvas for that of the screen, producing a digital drawing in his iPhone’s Notes app that follows his 2021 series “The 50.” While it brings to mind two of Scully’s canvases positioned in a vertical arrangement – the “Diptych” of the edition’s title – the lack of any similarly hard borders around the two compositions significantly changes their effect, making it appear as if they are floating on a neutral ground or void. Their proximity to Scully’s paintings suggests a different reading, however: Transposed into the materiality of a pigment print, the blank ground of the iPhone screen becomes a surface rather than a substrate, while the marks left by Scully’s finger become openings that simultaneously conceal and reveal the hidden human depths beneath it.