Sean Scully

This book documents Thaddeus Ropac gallery's first exhibition of Sean Scully (born 1945), which includes his most recent works, notably the Mirroring series.

During 2020, a year rocked by a global pandemic and political unrest, Sean Scully (born 1945) painted two new monumental series of paintings, titled The 12 and Dark Windows. Through essays and an interview, this publication sets out the historical context for these works.

In this volume, Irish American painter Sean Scully (born 1945) meets with American philosopher and art critic David Carrier for a series of in-depth interviews on the nature of art and the artist’s relationship to his own work. An early job loading trucks at a cardboard factory inspired the stacked rectangle symbolism that would become the hallmark of his career; travels to Venice also greatly influenced his use of textured brushstrokes to evoke movement and flow even within carefully structured geometric patterns.

Carrier probes these central elements of Scully’s art along with many more questions about art history and Scully’s own position within it. The assembling of such personal insights results in a book that functions as both a collection of compelling dialogues and an autobiography of Scully. Readers are able to discover Scully’s art anew through his answers to Carrier’s incisive questions.

This book collates the writings of some 50 international critics, curators, philosophers and historians who have charted the single-minded course that Sean Scully (born 1945) followed in the first three decades of his career. Reflecting the astonishing variety of his compositions, each one identifies novel aspects in the work and discovers something fresh to say. Illustrated with Scully’s major paintings from the late 1960s to 1999, and with dozens of installation views, behind-the-scenes studio shots and portraits of the artist (many published here for the first time), this collection provides a concise account of the work of a painter who more than any other has demonstrated the poetic qualities of abstraction.

Contributors include: William Feaver, Peter Fuller, Joseph Masheck, Adrian Lewis, Holland Cotter, John Caldwell, David Carrier, Susanne Lambrecht, Lynne Cooke, Robert Hughes, Arthur C. Danto, Carter Ratcliff, Enrique Juncosa, Jean Frémon, Mark Glazebrook, Donald Kuspit, Edward Lucie-Smith, John Yau and Colm Tóibín.

This generous volume gathers recent works and new, unseen pieces by celebrated New York–based Irish abstract artist Sean Scully (born 1945), who has created a series of new sculptures, paintings, drawings and watercolors directly inspired by the Venetian abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, its vast illuminated manuscript collections and the 16th-century Benedictine church. These works are instantly recognizable for Scully’s visual vocabulary of horizontal and vertical stripes, which reflects fifty years of constant refining. Human includes paintings from his Madonna series, Scully’s return to figuration after having ceased figurative painting five decades ago.

The fulcrum of the volume is the new and impressive Opulent Ascension, a site-specific sculpture that is Scully’s tallest sculpture ever at 33 feet high, constructed from stacked frames, each wrapped in rich and varying colors of felt.

The abstract paintings of the acclaimed New York–based painter, sculptor, writer and poet Sean Scully (born 1945) are world-famous, but until now, relatively little attention has been paid to his sculptures. For these, Scully layers elements made of steel, stone, bronze and painted aluminum on top of each other, creating horizontal structures that expand upward, yet are also linked to the stripes in his paintings.

These works are possessed of a compelling simplicity, recalling children’s blocks stacked up in solid or precarious-seeming assemblies. In Scully’s hands, these materials develop into a three-dimensional extension of the horizontal stripes of his paintings, extending their allusions to sea, land and sky into a multiplicity of tactile assocations.

This monograph is the first to compile Scully’s sculptures in one volume. Besides numerous plates, it includes several essays about these important works.

Irish-born, New York–based artist Sean Scully (born 1945) is famed internationally for his luscious abstractions. Scully creates large-format paintings with an intense application of color and rough brushstrokes. Checkered or striped patterns emerge, evoking the aesthetic of geometric minimalism. Sean Scully: Eleuthera reveals a surprising and more private side of the artist's work. The Eleuthera series, from the years 2016–17, consists of 25 large-format oil paintings depicting Oisín, the artist’s seven-year-old son, playing on the beach of Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. The emergence of figuration in the artist's work does not, however, exclude the bright abstract bands of color he is known for: instead, Scully's colors warp to compose the figure of his son, as well as the landscape around him.

This catalog, the second volume in a proposed series of five, chronicles Sean Scully’s (born 1945) paintings of the 1980s. Beginning with major breakthrough works early in the decade, it profiles the development of Scully’s mature style as well as his growing success in America and internationally.

Scully, a native of Ireland, was educated in England and moved to the United States in 1975. By the early 1980s, he was established in New York, where he developed a powerful style of richly painted stripes and shapes with a masterly control of color and strongly built canvases. In a period of low regard for abstract painting, Scully reinvigorated the form to include rich evocations of places, literature and emotion.

With more than 100 illustrations, Sean Scully: Vita Duplex provides a comprehensive look at the artist’s visual oeuvre, as well as his world of ideas, and defines its place in the history of abstract painting. One of the most important abstract artists of our time, Scully (born 1945) allows conflict to take place in his paintings—conflict between structure and emotion, body and spirit, impulsivity and reflection. The Irish-American painter has been reinterpreting abstract art since the 1960s, not as a purely formal exploration of color, form, planes, structure, body and light, but as a medium whose means of expression is tied to external and internal moods, literary influences and physical experiences. Scully has articulated this attitude in many lectures, interviews and texts, which comprise the starting point for this book.

Published for the 56th Venice Biennale, a complete monograph devoted to the Irish-born American-based painter and printmaker who has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. ?Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Sean Scully has gained international prominence as one of the most admired contemporary abstract painters today. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, Scully’s great achievement is the reinvigoration of abstract painting with the metaphorical, the philosophical, and the sublime combined with the earthy tangibility of paint. 

From his precisely gridded works of the 1970s to the three-dimensional panels of the 1980s and his now celebrated Wall of Light paintings from the 1990s, this volume gathers the entire oeuvre of the artist, whose work is held in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and the Tate, London.

Elected a Royal Academician in 2013, Sean Scully has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice, in 1989 and in 1993. He lives and works in New York, Barcelona, and Munich. Danilo Eccher has been Director of GAM Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea of Turin since 2009.