Sean Scully, Gabriel, detail, 1993, 259 x 366 cm. Col·lecció d'Art Contemporani, Fundació ''La Caixa'', Barcelona.

Sean Scully, 1.11.03, detail, 2003, 101.6 x 152.3 cm, Private Collection, London.

Sean Scully, Mexico One Window Green, 2001. 122 x 152,5 cm. Private Collection.

Sean Scully, Dark triptych, 2003, Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.6 cm, Private collection.

Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc, s/n
+34-934-439-470
Barcelona
Sean Scully
June 28-
September 30, 2007

Scully's paintings are often made up of a number of panels and are abstract. Scully paints in oils, sometimes laying the paint on quite thickly to create textured surfaces. Today he is one of the most widely acclaimed and exhibited painters in the world. After a brief initial period of hard-edge painting Scully abandoned the masking tape while retaining his characteristic motif of the stripe. For over a quarter of a century since he has developed and refined his own instantly recognisable style of heroic geometric abstraction. His paintings typically involve tough architectural constructions of abutting walls and panels of densely and lushly painted stripes. Though he frequently works on a monumental scale, even on a more modest scale his paintings and works on paper exude a romantic gravity of an unmistakably urban rather than rural tenor. In recent years his has augmented his trademark stripes by also deploying a mode of compositional patterning more reminiscent of a checkerboard.

A retrospective of the work of Sean Scully (Dublin, 1945), who combines features of different pictorial styles — Geometrical Abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Abstract Expressionism — to create a language of his own. By displaying his paintings, drawings and photographs together, we are able to see the consistency that gives meaning to his art.

Sean Scully (born Dublin, Ireland, June 30, 1945) moved with his family to England in 1949. He first studied art at London's Croydon College of Art (now Croydon College) and later at Newcastle University and at Harvard University in the U.S. He settled in New York City in 1975 becoming an American citizen in 1983.

Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and is represented in the permanent collections of a number of museums and public galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the National Gallery of Australia, the Tate Gallery, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and many other private and public collections worldwide. In 2006 Scully donated eight of his paintings to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which opened an extension in May 2006 with a room dedicated to Scully's works. He was prof at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Sean Scully, Ookbar, detail, 1993-1994, Uqbar, 243.8 x 365.9 cm, Galerie Lelong, París.

Smithsonian
American Art Museum
Eighth and F Streets N.W.
202-275-1500
Washington
The Prints of Sean Scully
May 18-October 8, 2007

The Prints of Sean Scully presents for the first time at the Smithsonian American Art Museum a selection of 57 works from a master set of prints that was acquired in 2001 and is updated annually with newly created works. Scully chose the Smithsonian American Art Museum as the only museum in the United States to receive a master set. The artist’s prints range from large-scale, monumental compositions to smaller, more intimate expressions of the artist’s ideas.

The Prints of Sean Scully at the American Museum begins a national tour later this year. Joann Moser, senior curator for graphic arts, selected the prints and illustrated books featured in the exhibition.

Sean Scully (b. 1945) has been making prints for more than 30 years and considers these independent but complementary works to be as significant as his paintings. Using his instantly- recognizable block shapes, Scully’s richly layered prints explore recurring themes in his work, such as the play of light and shadow, the expressive qualities of color and the spatial relationships created by the edges of his distinctive abstract forms.

“Best known as a creator of bold, monumental paintings, Scully has developed a language of abstract form and color with which he communicates a broad range of sensations, from the physicality of a wall to the transience of light,” said Moser.

Scully was first introduced to printmaking working for a commercial printer in London in the early 1960s. This direct involvement with printmaking helped Scully develop a sensitivity to its expressive character. After concentrating on painting for more than a decade, he returned to making prints with a small stark line etching, Princeton (1982). Even when he began working with professional printers, a year later in 1983, Scully remained in complete control of the process.

The large, bold woodcuts Scully made from 1986 to 1993 have a strong, physical presence. The deep gouges and uneven surfaces of the woodblock prints, such as Conversation (1986), create an energized surface of lines and have a rough texture. The triptych format, each panel a different height, is reminiscent of his paintings with canvases of different sizes and depths butted together to form a single composition.

Scully’s abstract imagery conveys emotion and atmosphere. He explores the evocative possibilities of texture, tone, and color in his prints, and the colors, composition and luminosity of the works are often based on personal experiences. For example, the scratches and scrapes from the backs of plates and the mottled surfaces of his spitbite etchings conjure the texture of timeworn facades captured in his photographs. The surface texture of Wall (1988) evokes crude boards of fences and doors. Glimpses of paper between areas of color suggest a sliver of sky through a broken fence or open window. The blue tonality in the left half of Mirror Yellow (1998) recalls dusk, while the yellow glow of the right half hints at dawn. Scully is comfortable with these associations, as long as they do not become too literal.

Scully’s Wall of Light prints, 2000 to 2005, emphasize luminosity and transparency. Rectangular forms float and overlap, soft edges creating delicate lines of indeterminate shape between them. These prints are rooted in the artist’s hand-drawn forms, his subtle touch humanizing otherwise geometric shapes. These works speak of transience and spirituality.

In 2004, Scully was invited to make lithographs while in Paris. He agreed to try the process for the first time since art school, enticed by the masterful lithographs Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made in the late 19th century. Lithographs Scully made in Paris depart from the refined surfaces, colors and forms of the Wall of Light prints. Scully embraced a more physical, autographic expression in these works. The prints he made, such as Paris Black (2004), emphasize the basic principle of the lithographic process, which involves oil and water. For this work, Scully did not clean his brushes carefully, and water accidentally mixed with turpentine and oily ink, creating a “brutal roughness.

Scully has placed four of the five master sets of his prints in museums around the world. His gift to the museum in 2001 included 131 etchings, aquatints, woodcuts and screen prints and two artists’ books. New work is added to the set each year, which consists of 183 works currently. Blue Fold, on view in the exhibition, is one of the most recent works to enter the museum’s collection. In addition to the prints, Scully’s major painting Maesta (1983) is on view in the permanent collection galleries. Maesta came at a critical point in Scully’s career, when he was developing a more physical and emotional approach to abstraction, and is considered by the artist to be one of his most important paintings. The museum acquired the painting in 2004.

Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945 but was raised in London, where his family moved in 1949. He attended classes at London’s Central School of Art (1962–1965) and at Croydon College of Art (1965–1968) and received a bachelor’s degree from Newcastle University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1972. That year, he traveled to the United States for the first time for a one-year residency at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He moved to the United States in 1975, settling in New York City. He taught at Princeton University from 1977 to 1982 and was a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York City from 1981 to 1984. In 1983, the year he became a U.S. citizen, Scully received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Scully was nominated in 1989 and in 1993 for the Turner Prize that is presented annually by the Tate Gallery in Britain. His paintings, prints, pastels and photographs have been exhibited internationally, and his work is in the permanent collections of some of the leading museum in the U.S. and Europe. Scully maintains studios in New York City, Barcelona, Spain; and Munich, Germany.