Sean Scully

Mark Rothko changed Sean Scully’s view of art

Sean Scully was born on 30 June 1945 in Dublin, but economic pressures forced the artist’s family to leave their Irish home to move to London. Sean Scully spent his childhood in a working suburb in the south of the city and attended a local convent school. The paintings in the nearby Catholic church made a deep impression on the boy and he decided already at the age of nine to become a painter. Following a printing apprenticeship, he worked temporarily in a graphic design studio and at the same time dedicated himself for three years to figurative painting at an evening course. His role models at this time included Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, but this quickly changed when he was confronted with Abstract Expressionism, namely the work of Mark Rothko. From this moment on, Sean Scully turned his whole energy and passion to abstraction.

Painter against the current; interest in Minimalism and photography

From 1968 to 1972, Sean Scully studied at Newcastle University where he joined a minority through the conscious orientation to painting, because the majority of the students were engaged with the new and exciting idea of conceptual art. A scholarship led Scully to the USA for the first time in the 1970s where he explored the style of Hard Edge. His first solo exhibition in London was a great success and rapidly sold out, whilst in New York he made friends with the painter Robert Ryman and dedicated himself to Minimalism. Scully occasionally largely eschewed colour in his work, approaching an almost monochrome mode of representation, but despite some respectable success, international breakthrough came only in the late 1980s. The artist subsequently also turned to photography and published a number of his works. With the series Floating Paintings, consisting of three-dimensional paintings on painted aluminium blocks, he also approached sculpture without really abandoning his true genre of painting. 

A sought-after teacher at the big international universities

Sean Scully also took on various teaching positions at renowned universities, teaching in London at Goldsmith College of Art and Design, in New Jersey at Princeton University, in New York at Harvard University, and in Munich at the Academy of Fine Arts. The artist maintained contact with many of his students from his teaching days and has had a particular relationship with Munich ever since Armin Zweite showed selected works by Scully in the Lenbachhaus in the early 1980s. Sean Scully has received prizes and awards for his art including ‘International Artist of the Year’ for the international fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar in 2016. 

Sean Scully lives and works today in New York, Barcelona, Berlin and Königsdorf.