Sean Scully
Sean Scully was born in Dublin and moved to England with his family in 1949. He studied at Croydon College of Art from 1965-67, and later at University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1967-71) and finally Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1972-3). He became an American citizen in 1983.
His work is concerned with the conceptual debates around the question of art and language from 1970s. Scully's work is dedicated to and predicated on the fundamental concerns of abstract art and he has been deeply influenced by abstract expressionism since the beginning of his artistic career. He works with a narrow palette and a limited set of geometric forms including rectangles and vertical and horizontal lines. He later evolved his style into minimalism deconstructing his grid effect, his use of colour while maintaining his fundamental element of structure.
Throughout his evolution, Scully remains a self proclaimed colourist. Scully's approach asserts the hand of the artist whose presence, along with the physicality of the paint, combine to make his paintings sensual.
Among his achievements Scully was awarded the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize in 1970, the prize awarded at the Northern Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester in 1971; the John Knox bursary enabling him to spend time at Harvard University in 1972; the Harkness bursary in 1975; a Guggenheim Foundation bursary in 1983; and the National Endowment for the Arts bursary awarded by the US government in 1984. He is an internationally recognised artist and his work is included in a number of important collections including he Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and Hugh Lane Gallery.
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His work is concerned with the conceptual debates around the question of art and language from 1970s. Scully's work is dedicated to and predicated on the fundamental concerns of abstract art and he has been deeply influenced by abstract expressionism since the beginning of his artistic career. He works with a narrow palette and a limited set of geometric forms including rectangles and vertical and horizontal lines. He later evolved his style into minimalism deconstructing his grid effect, his use of colour while maintaining his fundamental element of structure.
Throughout his evolution, Scully remains a self proclaimed colourist. Scully's approach asserts the hand of the artist whose presence, along with the physicality of the paint, combine to make his paintings sensual.
Among his achievements Scully was awarded the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize in 1970, the prize awarded at the Northern Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester in 1971; the John Knox bursary enabling him to spend time at Harvard University in 1972; the Harkness bursary in 1975; a Guggenheim Foundation bursary in 1983; and the National Endowment for the Arts bursary awarded by the US government in 1984. He is an internationally recognised artist and his work is included in a number of important collections including he Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and Hugh Lane Gallery.
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