SEAN SCULLY

Between the Figurative and the Abstract

“Scully is a painter who creates from the heart, to the heart.” (Josep de C. Laplana)

Over the course of his 80 years, Sean Scully has been nominated several times for the Turner Prize and has received numerous international accolades. He is one of the most influential contemporary artists, with a body of work that has long held a central place in abstract painting. Through his powerful color fields, rhythmic stripes, and unmistakable style, Scully has secured a place in major museums and collections around the world.

Born in Dublin in 1945, Sean Scully grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of London. Early experiences of social hardship—poverty, migration, exclusion—shaped his worldview and later became a silent subtext in his art. After studying at the Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University, he moved to New York in 1975 on a Harkness Fellowship, where he established himself within the American art scene—amid movements like Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art. Scully, however, remained loyal to painting.

In the mid-1960s, he also produced figurative works, though only few of these canvases have survived. Around 1964, he was particularly influenced by Fauvism and German Expressionism; the painters of Classical Modernism —André Derain, Henri Matisse, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—had a profound impact on his development.

Early on, Scully was interested in both European Modernism and American Minimal Art. He developed a visual language that combines geometric composition with expressive brushwork. His thickly applied oil paints convey emotion. Despite their formal reduction, his paintings have a tangible presence—they breathe; they speak of light, memory, and in-between spaces.

Scully was deeply influenced by his travels to Morocco, where he discovered a “geometry of emotions, of movement and spirituality”, which inspired him to begin painting his signature stripe works.

His travels to Mexico in the 1990s also had a strong impact, marking a shift from his earlier, strictly minimalist compositions to a warmer, more intuitive visual language, as seen in his world-renowned Wall of Light series.

"We live in a world made of walls and grids, a world of geometry and hyperstructures. My work is a way of dealing with that, of making it poetic and profound [...]."

Since the mid-1990s, Scully has been experimenting with painting surfaces to give his works an object-like character. A prime example is his Insets, in which he adds painted canvas pieces to larger canvases.

In addition to the thick oil paintings, Scully also works with watercolors, pastels, photography, and monumental sculpture. His work as an author reflects philosophical meditations on art and society.

At the heart of his oeuvre are series such as Wall of Light, Landline, and Human—each a homage to the structures of the world: to architecture, landscape, music, or literature. Scully’s painting is never just form. It is always also emotion.

Since 1973, Scully has held various teaching positions. He has captivated audiences with numerous exhibitions worldwide, including major retrospectives at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2001), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2006), the Kunstmuseum Bern (2012), the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2018). His latest exhibition The Albee Barn, Montauk at The Parrish Art Museum, Long Island (2025) is a survey of the artist’s work ranging from 1981 to 2024.

Today, Sean Scully lives and works in New York, Aix-en-Provence, and Bavaria. In these places, he continues to create works of powerful presence and timeless beauty.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday, we celebrate an artist whose work builds bridges—between America and Europe, between abstraction and emotion, between the artwork and its viewer.

26.08.2015, updated 23.05.2018 Stefanie Gommel (edited and updated 30.06.2025 by Mathilde Busse)

Quote: https://lehr-kunstauktionen.de/highlights/scully-sean-2/

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