Sean SCULLY

About the Artist

Sean Scully is an American-Irish artist known for his abstract paintings composed of brushy layers of alternating colored squares or stripes. Works often draw from specific memories of places and objects. “In making these paintings I was preoccupied with my memories of Venice, the movement of the water, how it heaves against the brick and stone of the city,” he explained of the works from his 2015 exhibition “Land Sea.” “From my studio south of Munich I often get in the car and drive a few hours down to Venice. It was the impressions from these trips that I brought back into the studio; I was painting the memories of Venice into the works.” Born on June 30, 1945 in Dublin, Ireland, Scully moved to London as a child and went on to study art at the Central School of Art and Croydon College of Art before receiving his BA from Newcastle University in 1972. Scully emigrated to the United States in 1975 and was granted citizenship in 1983. He currently lives and works between New York, NY, Barcelona, Spain, and Munich, Germany. Scully’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Geometric Abstraction: 1982 - present[edit]

In 1982 Scully began to work with the gallerist David McKee, an important relationship that lasted for a decade. During the summer of that year, Scully started producing small multi-panel works on found pieces of wood while staying in Montauk at the Edward Albee artist's colony. These works were titled Ridge, Plum, and Bear after the islands that surround Long Island. He also began applying a combination of rigid geometry and expressive texture and color to larger paintings that year. A prime example of this was Heart of Darkness, inspired by the 1899 novella of the same name.^[18] Scully began collaborating with Mohammad O. Khalil in 1983, this was the first time he had collaborated with a printmaker and was the start of a career-long commitment to printmaking.

In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art included Scully in their International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. The following year Scully's first American solo museum exhibition was held at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in 1985, and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Other major museums also began to acquire Scully's large-scale paintings, despite the dominant trend of the time tending towards Postmodernism. Scully's paintings from this period are heavy and physical in terms of both size and aesthetic, and make use of large-scale stretchers.^[27]

By 1987, Scully's work became less complex, flatter and smaller in scale, and began to include lighter color palettes beginning with Pale Fire in 1988. The same year, while experimenting with watercolors on a beach in Mexico, Scully created the first image that would become an extended meditation on architecture and light with the Wall of Light series.^[28] In 1989 the Whitechapel Gallery in London held a solo exhibition for Scully, which then traveled to Palacio Velázquez in Madrid and to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. These were Scully's first solo exhibitions in mainland Europe. The art critic Robert Hughes' 1989 piece for TIME magazine cemented Scully's increasing reputation.^[29]

The painting Why and What (Yellow) in 1988 was the first to incorporate an inset element of steel. By 1991 Scully expanded the use of steel, setting oil on linen insets into large steel panels. He also began the regular use of a checkerboard motif at this time, first hinted at in his Taped and Hidden Drawing paintings of the mid 1970s. In 1992, while teaching at Harvard University, Sean Scully revisited Morocco to film the BBC documentary The Artist's Journey: Sean Scully on Henri Matisse, with Matisse having visited Morocco in 1912 - 1913. 1993 saw the first exhibition of The Catherine Paintings, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. In 1994 he opened a second studio in Barcelona, and he returned to Morocco in 1995, to spend more time in the country. Atlas Walls is a portfolio of Scully's photographic works taken during this trip.^[30]

In 1995 Scully returned to New York, moving into a large new studio in Chelsea, Manhattan. Chelsea Wall was the first painting to be made there.^[31] Scully received a number of invitations to speak at academic institutions, and participated in the Joseph Beuys lectures on the state of contemporary art in Britain, Europe and the US, held by the Ruskin School at Oxford University, England. In 1997, Scully's photography was exhibited for the first time at the Sala de Exposiciones Rekalde in Bilbao, Spain.

Scully participated in a colloquium in conjunction with the exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998. He visited Santo Domingo in 1999, resulting in the photography portfolio Santa Domingo for Nené. That year, Scully's prints were given a retrospective at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna, Austria, and the Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe Originale in Gravelines. A catalogue raisonné of his prints from 1969 - 1999 was also published.