A world-renowned abstract painter, Sean Scully is one of the leading artists of his generation. He is best known for his impactful and internationally recognisable paintings balancing dynamic bands of colour in rhythmic formulations, capturing tonality, light and mood with great drama and delicacy. His global but deeply personal perspective has seen him absorb the core elements of the visual world – from the sky and sea to the ascetic modesty of stone architectural structures – as well as the full spectrum of human pathos, from grief and pain to fatherhood. Scully’s art is highly physical, often monumental in scale and populated by vigorous, robust shape and form, and yet it is also an art of great honesty, intimacy, and even vulnerability. An abstractionist but not a formalist, Scully deploys the power of colour, depth and volume not only to give expression to the world around him, but to provide access to the spiritual domain. In recent years, the artist’s explorations of space and volume have continued into large-scale sculptural works – monumental and megalithic-feeling stone blocks that weigh down on the land, as well as airy structures in Corten steel that open up and interact with the landscape. Across these diverse approaches to making art, Scully utilises a consciously constrained system to open up an energetic multiplicity of aesthetic possibility and emotional range.
Born in Dublin and raised in London, Scully now lives between New York and Germany.
Sean Scully
Langen Foundation, 2022
Photo by Sebastian Drüen
Sean Scully
Window 2021
archival pigment print on paper
edition of 40 + 7 AP
71.1 x 55.9 cm / 28 x 22 in (unframed)
Sean Scully
Cage Green 2021
archival pigment print on paper
edition of 40 + 7 AP
71.1 x 55.9 cm / 28 x 22 in (unframed)
Sean Scully
Inset 2021
archival pigment print on paper
edition of 40 + 7 AP
71.1 x 55.9 cm / 28 x 22 in (unframed)
Sean Scully
Zinc Shot, 2020
Galvanized water tanks
352 x 240 x 244 cm / 11.5 x 7.9 x 8 ft
Song of Color, Langen Foundation, 2022
Sean Scully
Boxes Full of Air, 2015
corten steel
3.66 x 6.10 x 15.24 m / 12 x 20 x 50 ft
Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence
Sean Scully
Glass Stack 2, 2020
Murano glass
270 x 108 x 108 cm / 106.3 x 42.5 x 42.5 in
Material World, Thorvaldsen's Museum, Copenhagen, 2022
Photo Jens Lindhe
Sean Scully
Wall 23.10.20, 2020
pastel on paper
55.9 x 76.2 cm / 22 x 30 in paper size
71 x 91 x 5 cm / 28 x 35.8 x 2 in framed
Sean Scully
Doric M.12.2020, 2020
pastel on paper
101.6 x 152.4 cm / 40 x 60 in paper size
120.7 x 171.5 cm / 47.5 x 67.5 in framed
Sean Scully
Red Doric 7.15.19, 2019
pastel on paper
102.6 x 152.4 cm / 40.4 x 60 in paper size
119.2 x 168.2 x 7 cm /46.9 x 66.2 x 2.8 in framed
Sean Scully has had solo exhibitions in leading museums around the world including, most recently, Houghton Hall, UK (2023); the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Thorsvaldens Museum, Copenhagen; MAMbo, Bologna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; CSW, Torun, Poland (all 2022); Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; Benaki Museum, Athens; Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (all 2021); Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; LWL Museum, Münster; the National Gallery, London; and the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (all 2019). Current exhibitions include Géographies, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France (until 13 January) and Artists Choose Parrish, Parrish Art Museum, Long Island, NY, USA (until 18 February).
Scully’s work is represented in the collections of The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; National Gallery of Australia; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20/K21, Düsseldorf; Tate Gallery, London; Hugh Lane Gallery; Irish Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, amongst many others.
Sean Scully
Beyond the Line: Stefan Gierowski and Sean Scully, 2024
Curated by Joachim Pissarro
Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw, Poland
Sean Scully
A Wound in a Dance with Love, 2022
Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo), Bologna, Italy
Sean Scully
Painting and Sculpture, 2022
Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Toruń, Poland
Sean Scully
The Shape of Ideas, 2022
Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA
Sean Scully
Bodies of Color, 2022
Kunstwerk Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf, Germany
Sean Scully
Song of Colors, 2022
Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany
Sean Scully
The Shape of Ideas, 2021
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Sean Scully
Eleuthera, 2021
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland
Sean Scully
Passenger, 2020
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Sean Scully
Human, 2019
Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Italy
Sean Scully
Vita Duplex, 2018
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany
Sean Scully
Landlines and other recent works, 2018
De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Sean Scully
Different Places, 2015
Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France
Sean Scully A romantic geometry of colors is a new solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris. It spans his career from the early 1970s to his most recent works.
Stefan Gierowski (1925–2022) and Sean Scully (b. 1945) come together for a two-person exhibition, curated by Joachim Pissarro.
From 2 August to 27 October 2024, the He Art Museum (HEM) will present Sean Scully’s solo exhibition “Away from the Sea” featuring 40 paintings and sculptures created since the 1960s, tracing the artist’s practice that spans over half a century.
Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle, presented by the Broadway Mall Association, is a public art project opening on 12 July. The exhibition presents seven large-scale sculptures at seven locations along Broadway, New York.
Presented by Le Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Sean Scully's solo exhibition Blur The Edges, Love One Another is at Château d’Oiron, a 17th-century castle in Western France, from 23 June until 6 October 2024.
For Normandie Impressionniste, Sean Scully presents a spectacular intervention of large-format paintings and monumental sculptures in Saint-Nicolas, a Romanesque church in Caen, France.
Sean Scully's solo exhibition UNINSIDEOUT is now open at The Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, and includes significant donations to the museum collection. It follows Scully's major retrospective Passenger at the museum in 2020.
The Ludwig Museum in Koblenz shows 35 paintings, plus watercolours, pastels and drawings by Sean Scully. Géographies focuses on the artist’s life stages and travels. It’s about places where he lives and works, and those which particularly inspired him.
A strong history of philanthropy is celebrated at The Hugh Lane Gallery. Works by Richard Gorman, Elizabeth Magill, Brian Maguire and Sean Scully are exhibited alongside the museum's founding donation, which includes works by Manet, Monet, Degas, Corot and Courbet.
Two-person exhibition by Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully. Curated by esteemed art historian Joachim Pissarro, this groundbreaking exhibition will unfurl in conjunction with Art Basel Hong Kong over two venues: The Asia Society and Ben Brown Fine Arts, both in Hong Kong.
Sean & Oisin Scully will launch their children's book Jack The Wolf in Ireland with two special events on Saturday 16 December.
Sean Scully is exhibiting as part of Artists Choose Parrish Part III, part of the museum's 125th anniversary celebrations.
Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain presents the first solo exhibition by Sean Scully in Brittany.
Sean Scully will take over the grounds, galleries and historic interiors of Houghton Hall in Norfolk, presenting sculpture, painting and works on paper.
Sean Scully has unveiled a major new public sculpture in Hanover Square, London.
Large-scale retrospective presenting sixty-four of Sean Scully’s seminal artworks – canvases, works on paper, photographs, and sculptures – showing a cross-section of the past 50 years of the artist’s work.
Sean Scully is creating large-scale, site-specific sculptures specifically for the museum in his first ever Danish solo show.
Large-scale retrospective of works by Sean Scully.
Review of Sean Scully's retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Philip Kennicott for The Washington Post.
Sean Scully retrospective and first exhibition in Poland.
The Shape of Ideas is a solo exhibition by Sean Scully at Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Sean Scully solo exhibition at Langen Foundation, Neuss.
Almost ten years after Doric, the exhibition that introduced the art of Sean Scully to Greece, the Benaki Museum presents a major retrospective of the eminent artist’s work, Passenger.
Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko are included in 'Andy Warhol to Cecily Brown from the Collections of the Albertina Museum'.
From The Real: Liliane Tomasko and Sean Scully is an exhibition of two painting shows in one, presenting the artists' work side by side at Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, England.
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, features the artist’s most significant works and examines his contribution to the development of abstraction over a span of nearly five decades.
Sean Scully's 'Eleuthera' series shown for the first time in Ireland at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.
