Sean Scully
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Sean Scully (born Dublin, Ireland, 30 June 1945) is an Irish-born American painter and has twice been a Turner Prize nominee. His work is in major museums worldwide.
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[edit] Life and work
Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland, but moved with his family to England in 1949. There he studied art first at London's Croydon College of Art (now Croydon College) and later at Newcastle University and at Harvard University in the United States. He settled in New York City in 1975 and became 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. [1]
In 2005 to 2006, Scully's Wall of Light series was displayed in art museums across the United States. The work originated in on a trip Scully took to Mexico in 1983. He combines abstract works with figures. [2]
| “ | I hold to a very Romantic ideal of what's possible in art, and I hold to the idea of the 'personal universal.' This is a complex agenda. My project is complicated in this way, and in that sense I'm out of fashion. I'm going against the current trend towards bizarreness, oddness; as you just called it, the 'esoteric', which of course was around in the 1930s. That's what is being revisited now. In between the two great wars, there was a very strong period, particularly in Europe, of a strange, bizarre, distorted and perverse kind of figuration, with freaks in the paintings. Very disturbing twins, subjects like that. These paintings were mostly coming out of Italy and Germany. Now we have a return to that—again in a strange period, after the end of Modernism.[2] | ” |
He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
[edit] Description of work
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. He has stated that this style represents the way in which Ireland has moved towards a more chequered society. He stated in 2006, "I remember growing up in Ireland and everything being chequered, even the fields and the people."
[edit] Works in collections
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- The Museum of Modern Art, New York
- The Guggenheim Museum, New York
- The Art Institute of Chicago
- The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., including
- The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
- The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
- The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
- The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
- The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
- The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
- The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
- Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Madrid
- Tate Modern, London
- The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
- The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, including
- Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan.
[edit] References
- ^ Reopening of the Hugh Lane
- ^ a b João Ribas (October 20, 2005), Sean Scully, ARTINFO, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/1376/sean-scully/>. Retrieved on 29 April 2008
[edit] Sources
- Dorothy Walker (2002), Scully, Seán in Brian Lalor (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillian, ISBN 0-7171-3000-2.
- Arthur C. Danto (2007), "Architectural Principles in the Art of Sean Scully", Border Crossings: A Magazine of the Arts, vol. 26(3), August 2007, p. 62-67. ISSN 0831-2559.
