Sean Scully Biography

Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 30 June 1945.

1949–59
Family moves to London.
Grows up in a working-class area of south London and attends local convent schools. Paintings in Catholic churches have an important influence on him. The 9-year-old schoolboy wants to become an artist.
Becomes interested in American rhythm and blues music and starts a music club of his own. Retains his interest in popular music all his life.

1960–62
Apprenticed at a commercial printing shop in London. Joins a graphic design studio.

1962–65
Attends evening classes at the Central School of Art, London.
Is interested in figurative painting.

1964
Sees Vincent van Gogh’s painting Van Gogh’s chair 1888 at the Tate Gallery, London. Its feeling of honesty has a profound effect.

1965
Decides to dedicate himself entirely to art studies. Studies at the Croydon College of Art, London, until 1968.
Is interested in van Gogh, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Henri Matisse.
Discovers Abstract Expressionism.

1967
Comes across a copy of Mark Rothko’s exhibition catalogue of 1961. Abandons figurative painting altogether. Influenced also by Bridget Riley’s Op Art.

1968–72
Undertakes a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts at Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. After graduating with First Class Honours he remains as a teaching assistant. At the same time teaches one day a week at the Sunderland College of Art.
His technically flawless paintings consist of a complicated grid system of intersecting bands and lines, which form a rich optical field. The illusion of depth and space is activated by colour contrasts. The influence of Op Art is clearly visible.
Visits Morocco in 1969. The stripes and colours of local textiles and carpets and the southern light make a deep impression — as experienced by Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee.

1970
Awarded the Stuyvesant Foundation Prize.

1972–73
Makes his first visit to the United States of America. Awarded the Frank Knox Fellowship and resides at the Visual Arts Center at the Caprenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Experiments with new techniques. Starts using tape and spray paints in paintings composed of grids of interlacing vertical and horizontal or diagonal bands and stripes. All expressiveness is omitted.

1973
After returning to England has his first exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London. All work is sold.
Inset #2 marks a temporary break from his rigid grid system and prefigures his device of the inset canvas, which becomes his distinctive feature from the beginning of the 1980s.

1973–75
Teaches at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and Goldsmith’s College of Art and Design, London.

1975
Creates Change, a series of 50 acrylic works on paper. The pivotal series reflects the crises of his personal life. At the same time it prefigures the large, spatially hermetic dark canvases of the following years.
Awarded the Harkness Fellowship for two years. Moves to New York. Lives with the painter Catherine Lee. American art, especially Minimalism, and his friendship with Robert Ryman encourage him to simplify his expression.

1977
Has his first solo exhibition in New York at the Duffy-Gibbs Gallery.

1977–82
Teaches part-time at Princeton University, New Jersey. Develops important friendships and contacts in the academic and art world.
At this time his paintings are grey or dark, almost monochrome ’black paintings’. The composition is pared down to the extreme. Sets of squares are replaced by thin horizontal or vertical lines.

1978
Marries Catherine Lee.

1979
Decides together with his wife to choose from
his works every year one especially important
or typical work to be named after her. This
marks the beginning of his private collection,
the Catherine Paintings series. Later all the Catherine Paintings are included in the
collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

1980
The first joint exihibition with Catherine Lee in the Andreas Stucken Alternative Art Gallery at the Museum für SubKultur in Berlin. Completes the mural for the exhibition.
Travels to Mexico. Inspired by the trip, he begins painting from nature, transcribing his experience of colour and light directly onto the paper with watercolours. Before 1980 he had used watercolour only occasionally.

1981
Has a first retrospective, which opens at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and travels within the United Kingdom and Ireland under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Starts to withdraw from minimalist aesthetics. Colour and space return. Stops taping his stripes and starts drawing them freehand. Brushstrokes are clearly visible. A soft painterly outline becomes characteristic of his works. Gets his richness of colour by overpainting in many different layers.
The large polyptych Backs and fronts, his manifesto painting, is completed.
               
1981–84
Professor at the Parsons School of Art, New York.

1982
Spends part of the summer working at the artists’ colony founded by Edward Albee at Montauk, Long Island. Produces small works on panel.
Reaches maturity in Heart of Darkness. Combines rigid geometry with expressive texture and colour.

1982–83
Uses his inset technique with more freedom. Combines and recombines canvases to make polyptychs.

1983
Becomes an American citizen.
Paul, his 19-year-old son from his first marriage, dies in a car accident in London.
Receives the Guggenheim Fellowship.
His work with the etcher Mohammad Khalil represents his first collaboration with a printer. This prefigures his long-term commitment to printmaking using various graphic techniques.

1984
Awarded Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
International breakthrough, marked by his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s exhibition An international survey of recent painting and sculpture.
Dedicates his painting Paul to his deceased son.

1985
Has his first solo exhibition in an American museum at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.
Major museums acquire large-scale Modernist paintings by Scully at a time when Postmodernism is the dominant trend.
The paintings become more physical, to the point where they can stand freely on the floor without any need for support, although they are conceived to hang on the wall.

1987
Changes to a less complex, flatter and smaller scale of working.
First use of the inset technique to embed a small canvas into a large one.

1987–90
Makes a number of visits to Mexico. Exposure to new sources of visual stimuli can be seen in his watercolours and works on paper.

1988
Introduces an element of steel for the first time.

1989
Has his first solo exhibition in a European museum; exhibition travels from the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, to Palacio Velázquez, Madrid, and to Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

1990
Maurice Poirier’s monograph on Scully is published by Hudson Hills Press, New York. Photographs by Scully published for the first time, in black and white as illustrations and in colour in the paintings section.

1991
Starts to incorporate his insets into large steel frames.
Returns to the checkerboard motif, which he used quite early in his oeuvre.

1992
In December revisits Morocco to make a film for the BBC on Matisse, who visited Morocco in 1912–13.
Lectures at Harvard.

1993
Has his first exhibition of the Catherine Paintings in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

1994
Makes first paintings at his new studio in Barcelona.

1995
Participates in the Joseph Beuys Lectures 1995 on the state of contemporary art in Britain, Europe and the United States, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, England.
Starts making three-dimensional Floating Paintings. These are rectangular vertical sheet metal boxes attached to the wall along one of their narrowest sides. The other sides are covered by painted vertical stripes.

1996
Visits Morocco. The portfolio Atlas Walls of 1998 includes several photos from this trip.

1997
Photographs exhibited for the first time, Sala de Exposiciones Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain.

1998
Participates in a colloquium held in conjunction with the Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–92) exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

1999
Visits Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. The portfolio Santo Domingo for Nené
(cat. 50) consists of photos taken during this trip.
Paints Chelsea wall, the first painting in the new studio in Chelsea, New York City.

2000
Becomes an Honorary Fellow of the London Institute of Arts and Letters.

2001
Becomes a member of Aosdána, an Irish affiliation of artists engaged in literature, music and the visual arts.

2002
Starts working as a part-time professor of painting at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, Germany.

2003–2004
Receives Honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and the National University of Ireland, Dublin.
The Sara Hildén Art Museum organises a retrospective exhibition at Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland (September 2003–February 2004). The exhibition travels to Weimar, Germany (March–May 2004) and to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (July–October 2004).
Lives and works in New York, Barcelona and in Mooseurach, Germany.

Biography substantially derived from Marjatta Saari, ’Life’, Sean Scully, Tampere: Sara Hildén Art Museum, 2003, pp. 206–216
For a comprehensive exhibitions history and bibliography of Sean Scully, see Sean Scully: Paintings, pastels, watercolors, photographs 1990–2000 (exhibition catalogue), Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001, pp. 260–269.