Though born in Dublin, painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer Sean Scully was raised in the slums of North London, where his family settled when he was four years old. Scully, who wanted to be an artist from a young age, was rejected by 11 art schools before getting accepted as a full-time student at Croydon College of Art in 1965. He would transfer to Newcastle University three years later and earn his degree in Fine Art.
Over the course of his career, Sean Scully has created a significant body of works on paper – watercolours, pastels and prints – although he is largely known for his large-scale abstract paintings that display regularly spaced geometrical elements. ‘It is metaphysical on some level. It’s certainly religious and spiritual. I think it has a very strong spiritual dimension,’ the artist has said of his art. ‘And I pull in a lot of other threads to my work. Obviously there’s simple geometry, simple drawing, all the way through it. And there’s the rhythm, the kind of rhythm you find in weaving and folk arts all over the world – in Morocco and other parts of Africa, in Ireland, in Lapland.’
Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993, and has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. He presently works at studios in Germany’s Bavarian countryside about an hour from Munich, as well as in Barcelona and New York.
His paintings and drawings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Tate Gallery in London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and other private and public collections.
