Sean Scully Irish-American, b. 1945

Sean Scully, born in Dublin in 1945, is one of Ireland’s most significant living artists, whose expansive practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. Best known for his monumental abstract works, Scully has developed a distinctive visual language – blocks of colour, arranged in rhythmic grids or stripes, that pulse with energy and emotion. Though grounded in geometry, his forms are anything but cold. Edges blur, surfaces thrum with texture, and colours glow with a brooding, sometimes radiant intensity. There is a human tenderness beneath the order, and, unlike the cool detachment of Minimalism, his abstractions are not escapes from the world, but ways of grappling with it. Scully’s influences are layered – ancient architecture, the drama of light on stone, the raw landscapes of Ireland and Spain – all absorbed and reimagined through paint. The result is a body of work that feels both timeless and fiercely personal. In navigating the space between structure and freedom, discipline and feeling, Scully has forged an abstract language that resonates far beyond form – a language shaped by memory, grounded in people, places, and things once held close.

Scully studied at Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University in the late 1960s, obtained a master’s degree in fine arts at Harvard University, Massachusettes, in 1973, and held teaching posts at Goldsmith’s College and Chelsea School of Art and Design, both in London, as well as Princeton University, New Jersey. Throughout his career, Scully has held numerous exhibitions in renowned art institutions worldwide, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Albertina, Vienna; Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK, and National Gallery of Art, London. In 2014, Scully became the first Western artist to have a career-length retrospective in China with Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 – 2014, which included over 100 paintings and travelled from Shanghai to Beijing. In 2016, a second major exhibition in China, Sean Scully: Resistance and Persistence, opened at the Art Museum of the Nanjing University of the Arts, and travelled to the Guangdong Museum and the Hubei Museum in Wuhan. Scully has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984). He was elected a Royal Academician (2013) and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize (1989,1993). Scully's works are held in the permanent collection of esteemed institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario; Tate, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Guangzhou Museum of Art, Guangzhou; and China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.