Sean Scully - Buy or sell works
30 June 1945, Dublin (Ireland)
Sean Scully is an Irish painter and illustrator, a two-time nominee for the Turner Prize and a fellow of the prestigious Royal Academy. He grew up in Great Britain and has been an American citizen since 1983. Today he travels between his various homes in Königsdorf, Berlin, Barcelona and New York.
Scully’s family relocated from Dublin to London while he was still a child, in the search for better employment opportunities. Impressed by church paintings, he developed the idea of becoming an artist at the age of nine.
He worked in a graphic design studio after completing a two-year apprenticeship as a printer. Scully learned the art of figurative painting by taking evening classes for three years. He attended the Croydon College of Art in London from 1965. He was mainly interested in Vincent van Gogh, Emile Nolde and Hen, at least until discovering abstract Expressionism. Scully moved to the North of England to study art at the Newcastle Academy in the 1970s. A John Knox scholarship allowed him to spend a year at Harvard University in 1972. There, he started to experiment with new painting techniques, which included his first use of adhesive tape to create precise and hard edges. This technique is also called Hard Edge Painting, and its purpose is to strip the motifs of any expressiveness. Scully’s first individual exhibition was 1973 at the Rowan Gallery in London, and was a positive success. Afterwards he remained in England for two more years. After receiving a Harkness Scholarship in 1975, he moved to New York, where he met his future wife, the painter Catherine Lee.
Sean started to take photographs during the 1990s, which he exhibited in his own studio in Barcelona. He opened a studio in the Chelsea district of New York in 1999, which also presented Floating Paintings - three-dimensional paintings on aluminium blocks.
Scully is among the artists who present a clear image structure with varied combinations of horizontal, vertical and quadratic fields of colour. He also adds an inset to many of his pieces, a technique that describes a canvas that had already been painted, and which is then inserted into the larger, actual painting.
Besides painting, Scully is also involved in other forms of art: for instance, he created a 30-meter wall sculpture for the University of Limerick between 2004 and 2005. His book Resistance and Persistence: Selected Writings was published a year later.
Today, Sean Scully is numbered among the most coveted artists worldwide, and his works feature in the collections of numerous prestigious museums. Each year, many individual exhibitions of the artist’s work open on various continents - there were fourteen in 2016 alone.
His oil painting Lucia (1992-96) was sold for €934,230 during a contemporary art auction at the Dorotheum on 20 May 2014.