Curator’s Notes
Sean Scully is a painter and sculptor who started out in the school of Minimalism in the 1970s and by the 1980s broke away from its rigid parameters. Based in New York at the time, the Irish painter was inspired by trips to Morocco and Mexico in the early 1980’s and subsequent watercolours which brought metaphor and spirituality into the artist’s work. The painting in our exhibition is from the artist’s “Wall of Light” series begun in 1998, nearly twenty years after his initial travels, and exemplifies the artist’s move from monochrome greys into vibrant combinations of colors.

“Quintana Roo Wall” of 2022 attempts to capture the elusive qualities of patterns of light and shadows on a masonry wall, where the light becomes something tangible and the stone becomes ephemeral. Scully’s paintings are a molten calculus, which the artist describes as Emotional Abstraction and the Geometry of Ecstasy. Their construction is confounding: are these stripes or blocks, are they moving front to back or back and forth? For Scully, color reflects emotion, memory, and experiences of the natural world. His paintings are densely layered with hidden underpainting affecting the final visuality of what the viewer experiences. Scully views his compositions as endless regenerations, part of an infinite field that is constantly being folded and unfolded to reveal new combinations.

Artist Bio
Sean Scully’s work has shifted the paradigm in American abstraction from Minimalism and its reduced vocabulary towards an emotional form of abstraction, returning to the metaphor and spirituality found in the European painting tradition. While known primarily for his large-scale abstract paintings, comprised of vertical and horizontal bands, tessellating blocks and geometrical forms comprised of gradated and shifting colours, Scully also works in a variety of diverse media, including printmaking, sculpture, watercolour and pastel. Having developed a style over the past five decades that is uniquely his own, Scully has cemented his place in the history of painting. His work synthesises a thoroughly international collection of influences and personal perspectives – ranging from the legacy of American abstraction, with inspiration from the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and that of European tradition, with nods to Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, as well as references to classical Greek architecture. While monumental in scale and gesture, Scully’s work retains an undeniable delicacy and sincerity of emotion.
Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in South London. Wanting to be an artist from an early age, Scully attended evening classes at the Central School of Art in London from 1962 to 1965, and enrolled full time at Croydon College of Art, London from 1965 until 1968. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Newcastle University in 1972. He was awarded the Frank Knox Fellowship to Harvard University in 1972, where he visited the United States for the first time. In 1975, he moved to New York full-time. Today, he lives and works between New York and Bavaria. With a career that spans more than five decades, he has received numerous accolades and has been the subject of multiple touring exhibitions. In 2014, he became the first Western artist to have a career-length retrospective in China. Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 – 2014 included over 100 paintings and travelled from Shanghai to Beijing. Scully was named a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013 and has received honorary degrees from institutions such as the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; the National University of Ireland, Dublin; Universitas Miguel Hernandez, Valencia; Burren College of Art, National University of Ireland; Newcastle University, UK, among others. A series of essays and conversations between Scully and the esteemed art critic Arthur Danto was published by Hatje Cantz in 2014, and a collection of Scully’s own writing, selected speeches and interviews, Inner, was released in 2016. Significant solo exhibitions of his work were
recently on view at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (23 April to 29 October 2023), Thorvaldens Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2 September - 5 March, 2023), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA (11 April - 31 July, 2022), Museum of FineArts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, (October 13 – January 15, 2021), Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (June 11, 2020 - January 3, 2021), Albertina, Vienna, Austria (7 June – 8 September 2019); San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Italy (11 May – 13 October 2019); LWL-Museum for Art and Culture, Münster, Germany (5 May – 8 September 2019); National Gallery of Art, London, UK (13 April – 11 August 2019); The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, USA (23 February – 19 May 2019) and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., USA (13 September 2018 – 3 February 2019); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK (29 September 2018 – 6 January 2019); De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands (21 April – 26 August 2018); Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany (24 March – 5 August 2018); State Russian Museum – Marble Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia (3 March – 9 May 2018); Museum of the Nanjing University of the Arts, China (8 April – 8 May 2016); Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (6 September – 9 October 2016); Hubei Art Museum, Wuhan, China (10 January – 12 March 2017); Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, China (23 November 2014 – 25 January 2015); and Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA), Beijing, China (12 March – 23 April 2015).

Sean Scully’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous important institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Tate Modern, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg; Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Albertina, Vienna; and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, among many others.