Sean Scully, one of this century’s greatest abstract artists, works and reworks blocks and stripes to bring about a kind of structural fidelity. Based on simple, geometric grids, Scully combines the traditions of classical European painting with the expressive impact of American abstract expressionism.

“My work is dedicated to edges. How they get there, how they coexist, how they assist each other. [Edges] are kissing, caressing, enveloping, and bumping into each other. How do we bump into each other? How do we negotiate the edges? This is the subject of my work.”

-Sean Scully

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Scully moved to London with his family, mostly living in working class neighborhoods in South London, without settling in one space for an extended period of time. Following an early desire to become an artist, Scully apprenticed as a typesetter in a printing shop as a teenager and worked in graphic design before pursuing formal coursework in painting at the Central School of Art. Although he was rejected by eleven art schools, Scully eventually studied at the Croydon College of Art, graduated from Newcastle University, and received a graduate fellowship at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, in the early 1970s. He immigrated to the United States in 1975 where he was granted citizenship in 1983.

Scully’s work has brought him a long list of accolades and recognition from around the world, including two nominations for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993. He has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, among many other major institutions. In 2015, he debuted a site-specific permanent installation at the Chapel Santa Cecilia de Montserrat in Catalonia, Italy in celebration of his seventieth birthday. He lives and works in New York, Barcelona and Munich.