Timothy Taylor

Sean Scully (b. 1945, Dublin, Ireland) is an American-Irish artist who is internationally recognised for his distinctive abstract compositions that interrogate the properties of light, colour and form.

Scully studied painting at Croydon College of Art, London and Newcastle University, UK, where he began to work in abstraction. During a trip to Morocco in 1969, Scully was strongly influenced by the local textiles and rich colours of the region, which he translated into the broad horizontal stripes and deep earth tones that characterise his mature style. Scully’s travels throughout Morocco and Mexico would also prompt his decision to move from Minimalism to a more emotional and humanistic form of abstraction. Following fellowships in 1972 and 1975 at Harvard University, Scully’s paintings became increasingly monumental and sculptural, consisting of interconnected three-dimensional panels that anticipated his later sculpture practice.
In 1984 he began to develop the Wall of Light series, replacing the precise stripes of his early paintings with solid blocks of colour, built with increasingly loose and feathered brushstrokes into vertical and horizontal ‘bricks’ that suggest a wall of stone. Subtle differences in colour in the paintings indicate the location in which they were created, the changing seasons and the artist’s own emotions. This series formed the subject of a major touring exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2007.

In 1984 Scully achieved international breakthrough through his inclusion in the major group exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1985, several major American museums began to acquire the artist’s paintings and he received his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In recent years Scully has turned to sculpture, working in steel and stone to create colossal structures that engage with the unique energy and history of their location. As in his paintings, Scully’s sculptures feature individual rectangular sections that slot together, maintaining his ongoing interest in interlocking brick forms.

Scully’s work is held in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Tate, London; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20K21, Düsseldorf; Albertina, Vienna; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Instituto Valencia d’Arte Modern, Valencia; Guangzhou Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China and China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China.

Scully has received numerous awards for his work, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984). Scully was elected a Royal Academician in 2013. He has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice, in 1989 and in 1993. A major retrospective toured multiple venues in China between 2015 - 2017.