Sean Scully is considered to be one of the world’s leading abstract painters. Born in Dublin and raised in London, he now lives between New York and Germany. Appropriately, therefore, Scully’s art is thoroughly international in perspective, drawing on the diverse historical and cultural influences of places that, at different times, have been profoundly important to him. He has taken inspiration from many cherished, varied elements of European culture (ranging from the harmonic ideals of ancient Greek architecture to the vernacular design of stone walls in rural Ireland) but he has also successfully responded to—and built on—the legacy of abstraction in the United States. Scully’s commanding, internationally recognisable style of abstract art—based on repeating and steadily adapting arrangements of discretely nuanced blocks of colour—combines considerable painterly drama with great visual delicacy. It is an art of tremendous vigour: Scully is a forceful, physical artist, who creates intentionally monumental spaces. But it is also an art of acute concentration and care: his work involves an ongoing negotiation between the monumental and the intimate.
Read MoreScully's many worldwide solo exhibitions include the Met Museum, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf, the Haus Der Kunst, Munich and IVAM, Valencia; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Scully is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery, Washington, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, the Tate Gallery, London, the Louisiana, Denmark, the Reina Sofia, Madrid, and in many other private and public collections worldwide.
Current and forthcoming solo exhibitions include: Eleuthera, Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels, (March–July 2020); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA, (May 2019—9 August 2020); Museum of Art Fort Worth Museum, Dallas, USA, (September 2020); Eleuthera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain, (15 October—19 January 2020) and Long Night, Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy, (18 April—6 January 2020).
Recent solo exhibitions include: Sean Scully at Picasso House, Château de Boisgeloup, Gisros, France, (2019); Human, Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, (2019); Vita Duplex, LWL Museum, Münster, (2019); Long Night, Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, (2019/2020); Lechner Museum, Ingolstadt, (2019/2020); Landline, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, (2019); Eleuthera, Albertina, Vienna, (2019); Sea Star, National Gallery, London, (2019); Vita Duplex, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, (2018); Landlines and other recent works, De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg (2018); Sean Scully: 1970, Walker Art, Liverpool Museum, (2018); Inside Out, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, (2018) & Kerlin Gallery (2018); San Cristóbal, Cuadra San Cristóbal, Mexico City, (2018); Facing East, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, travelling to State Russian Museum – Marble Palace, St Petersburg, Russia, (all 2017); Resistance and Persistence, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing, China, travelling to Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China; Hubei Art Museum, Wuhan, China, (all 2016); Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964–2014, Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, travelling to CAFA and Beijing, (2014–2015); Sean Scully – Figure/Abstract, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, travelling to Kunsthalle Rostock, Germany, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Ireland, (2014–2015); Different Places, Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, (2015); Land Sea, part of the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, (2015) and Sean Scully – Malerei als Weltaneignung, Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus, Austria, (2015).
Scully celebrated his 70th birthday in June 2015 by unveiling a new permanent site-specific installation at the world-famous Romanesque chapel Santa Cecília de Montserrat, near Barcelona.
Scully's work is represented in the collections of The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Tate Gallery, London; Ulster Museum, Belfast; National Gallery of Art, Washington; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego; Nagoya City Art Museum, Tokyo; International Forum, Tokyo and many more collectors both private and corporate collections in Ireland and abroad.
Text courtesy Kerlin Gallery.