Sean Scully is an Irish-born American-based artist whose work has been exhibited and collected in major art museums and institutions throughout the world. He is also a lecturer and has taught as a professor at a number of universities.
Over the course of his fifty-year career, Scully has created an influential body of work—paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs—that played a significant role in the development of contemporary abstraction. A key artistic figure in the rejection of Minimalism and the “death of painting,” Scully championed a return to emotions, metaphor, and spirituality in art. The ultimate focus of Scully’s work is a meditation on humanity – both his own and that of the world at large. “People tend to think of abstraction as abstract,” he has written, “but nothing is abstract: it’s still a self-portrait. A portrait of one’s condition.”
Scully’s solo exhibitions in 2021–22 include a major retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Benaki Museum, in Athens, Greece; Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej, Toruń, in Poland, and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, in Italy.
