Sean Scully

Biography

As a boy, after his shift on a building site, Sean Scully went every day to the Tate gallery at Millbank to look at Van Gogh’s “Chair”. He was then working as a labourer for plasterers in the ballroom of Victoria Station and was a little over sixteen.

He was born on 30 June 1945 in Dublin. In 1949 the family moved to London and for years drifted from one rented room to another in a working-class district of South London. By the age of nine he knew he would be an artist. From fifteen to seventeen he was apprenticed as a typesetter at a commercial printing shop; after that he took various jobs, including graphic design and work as a messenger, and in the evenings studied figurative painting at the Central School of Art. He later recalled that the idea of stacking, which underlies much of his work, came to him at a cardboard factory, where he loaded flattened boxes onto trucks. His mother was a vaudeville singer; as a teenager he became absorbed in rhythm and blues, ran a club in South London and for a short time played in a band with his brother and a friend.

From September 1965 Scully studied at Croydon College of Art, took printmaking at Camberwell School of Art, and in 1968 moved on to Newcastle University. There a university production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” made a strong impression on him. A trip to Morocco in 1969 gave him a motif he would never abandon: the multicoloured stripes that local people wove into woollen tents and clothing. In 1972 the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship took him to Harvard. In America he began working with masking tape and spray paint.

His first solo show, at the Rowan Gallery in London, sold out. Scully taught at Chelsea College of Art and Design and at Goldsmiths, and painted in a studio in Rotherhithe. In 1975, at thirty, he received a two-year Harkness Fellowship and left for New York. There he became friends with Robert Ryman, and Minimalism strongly affected his painting: for several years his palette was reduced to the grey monochrome of the “Black Paintings” series. In 1979, sharing a studio on Duane Street with the artist Catherine Lee, he began the “Catherine Paintings”: each year the most important work was chosen and entered a collection named after her.

By 1980 Scully considered himself at war with New York Minimalism and wanted to put something human back into the picture. He made several trips to Morocco and Mexico. He said later that painting had been stripped of the ability to make relationships, to be metaphorical, spiritual and poetic, and that all this had to be put back. In 1981 his first retrospective was held at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. In that year’s canvases colour and space returned, the stripes were drawn freehand rather than along tape, and the brushstroke stayed visible. The painting “Backs and Fronts” (1981) had an impact on the exhibition “Critical Perspectives” at PS1 in 1982.

From 1982 his dealer for ten years was David McKee. That summer in Montauk, at Edward Albee’s artists’ colony, Scully began making small multi-panel works on found pieces of wood and titled them “Ridge”, “Plum” and “Bear” after the islands around Long Island. In 1983 he worked with printmakers for the first time, with Mohammad Khalil, and printmaking stayed with him for life. That same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Critics describe his work of the early 1980s as muted in colour and sombre in mood and link this to the death of his son in 1983. In 1984 the Museum of Modern Art included him in its international survey of painting and sculpture, and in 1985 his first museum exhibition in the United States opened at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Major museums began buying his large canvases, although postmodernism then dominated.

By 1987 the works became simpler, flatter and smaller, and the palette lighter (“Pale Fire”, 1988). In the same year, trying out watercolour on a Mexican beach, he made the first sheet of what would become the “Wall of Light” series. In 1989 an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which then travelled to the Palacio Velázquez in Madrid and the Lenbachhaus in Munich, was Scully’s first solo exhibition in mainland Europe. He was twice nominated for the Turner Prize, in 1989 and in 1993. From 1988 he set steel elements into his paintings, from 1991 canvases inset into steel panels, and he began to use the checkerboard regularly, a motif foreshadowed in the mid-1970s. In 1992, while teaching at Harvard, he returned to Morocco and made a BBC film about Matisse. In 1994 he opened a second studio, in Barcelona, and in 1995 a large studio in Chelsea, in New York.

From 2002 to 2007 Scully was Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2005–2006 the “Wall of Light” series toured museums in the United States, from The Phillips Collection in Washington to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2006 the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin opened “The Sean Scully Room”. Retrospectives were held in Tampere, Weimar, Canberra, Barcelona, Duisburg and Belfast, and in 2014 the first major retrospective by a Western artist in China took place: “Follow the Heart”. In 2015 he took part in the Venice Biennale for the first time and completed the restoration of the church of Santa Cecília de Montserrat in Spain, with frescoes and the design of the altar and cross. In 2019 his work was shown beside Turner’s at the National Gallery in London, and in the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice he presented the exhibition “Human”.