'I'm the Donald Trump of the art world,' Sean Scully jokingly declared in the BBC documentary released in April this year about his art and life as one of the world's wealthiest living artists, in which he jets around the world on his private jet.

VENICE — The two most arresting exhibitions I saw among the Venice Biennale's collateral displays were Sean Scully's Human and Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum, curated by Phong Bui and Francesca Pietropaolo for The Brooklyn Rail. Scully's show is a magisterial display of a...

The 58 th edition of the Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff–from London’s very own Hayward Gallery–proves to be as interesting as its title promises. Venice is an easy city to get lost in, and it’s easy to see why Proust dubbed the city’s labyrinth of alleyways a network of 'innumerable slender capillary...

When I became an art critic in 1981 one of the first artists I met and wrote about was Sean Scully. At that time I was teaching philosophy in Pittsburgh and he, having recently moved to New York, was as yet without a dealer. We are almost the same age, and to some extent we grew up together. When we first met, he had just made the transition from...

Between Wimbledon and the FIFA World Cup, there's been plenty of distractions from London's unusually Mediterranean weather of late.

When I was last in New York I took the bus an hour’s ride north of Manhattan, to historic Tappan, and visited Sean Scully in his studio. I first met the contemporary painter at his other New York studio in Chelsea, and also spent a great weekend with him when he was over in the UK, looking around Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield, as he...

In 1983, while traveling through Mexico, the Irish-born, American artist Sean Scully made a series of watercolours inspired by the stacking of stones in Pre-Columbian and vernacular constructions. Although he put them aside at the time, these aquarelles came to shape his Wall of Light series in the late 1990s, introducing stripes and bars...

It’s a sunny autumn day in the small Japanese city of Okayama, and two British men born in the 1960s are conversing about cameras. Liam Gillick and I both own the retro-looking Fujifilm X-Pro1, which we’ve chosen for its impressive price-to-performance ratio. “I’ve used it a lot in my work,” a ruddy-faced, relaxed, and...

FRIDAY, MAY 20 Opening: Sean Scully at Cheim & Read This show marks a break from the Sean Scully we know, in more ways than one. For starters, these works won’t be on view at Cheim & Read’s white-cube Chelsea space—they’re being shown instead in a temporary, industrial annex in Ridgewood...

We had a chance to speak to the highly [rightfully] lauded painter and printmaker on the eve of his second major retrospective, this time at the University of the Arts in Nanjing. In the early part of your career you used an intersecting line and grid system, resulting in an multilayered optical field, then you began using watercolor, and...

As the most important living master of abstract art, Sean Scully’s second edition of retrospective in China — ‘ Sean Scully: Resistance and Persistence. Paintings 1967-2015. London and New York ’ – will be unveiled at the Art Museum Of Nanjing University of the Arts (AMNUA) on April 8, 2016. The exhibition will then...

In a lecture he gave in Vancouver in 2009, Liam Gillick suggested that his career as an artist was catalyzed by an inability to trust his own activity in the field of politics – his first career choice. In this light, his ongoing deferral to a strange lexicon of ciphers and fictions seems appropriate.