Sean Scully

Facing East

Sean Scully was born in Ireland and received a brilliant art education in the UK. He has worked in New York since 1975, and since the early 2000s his life and artistic output have been inextricably linked to New York and Munich.

In 1989 and 1993 Sean Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of contemporary art. He was granted the honorary degree Doctor of Literature from the University of Newcastle in 2010, and in 2013 became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. According to the legendary critic and culturologist Arthur Danto, the name of Sean Scully ‘belongs on the shortest of the short list of major painters of our time’.

His work features in permanent collections at the world’s leading museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London.

For half a century Sean Scully has devised his own artistic universe by accumulating and developing the best plastic traditions of the early twentieth century, combining them with the most complex metaphysical concepts from ancient Greek philosophy while also making reference to the latest philosophical practices that reflect a rapidly changing reality.

‘Sean Scully has built his own unique system, where colour and lines, demonstrating the erosion and articulation of boundaries, express the most important existential and social problems of mankind. His rigidly structured works are filled with the subtlest vibrations of meaning and experience,’ says Olga Sviblova, director of MAMM.