“The stripe is neutral and boring,” says Sean Scully of the most obvious ingredient of his work. In the ’70s he had already chosen the stripe as the dominant motif of his painting. At that time he used tape to outline the colored stripes that divided his canvases horizontally, vertically, or diagonally into exact forms. He employed this method with explicit reference to Piet Mondrian, whose ideas Scully wanted to develop further. In 1981 he discarded this impersonal technique and, replacing the rather cold acrylic used for the stripes up until then, introduced oil paint and, with that, a legible

In Richard Tuttle’s “According to the Dawn II,” 1992, one can clearly read the complex process that unfolds when a vague sensation is transferred onto a two-dimensional surface. The 12 monumental drawings in graphite and charcoal on paper are pasted onto stretched canvases. Wedged between the stretcher and the wall, a piece of cardboard, peeping out several millimeters on all four sides, constitutes a sort of frame behind the canvas. Every paper surface is subdivided into a grid of more or less regular pencil lines, interwoven with charcoal marks as plain as droplets on a windowpane. The lineation