Sean Scully RA (1945 - )
Nationality
British
Education
1962-65: evening classes at Central School of Art
1965-68: Croydon College of Art
1967-71: University of Newcastle upon Tyne
1968-72: Newcastle University
1972-73: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Taught
1967-71: teaching assistant, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and at Sunderland College of Art
1973-75: Chelsea School of Art and Design and Goldsmith’s College of Art and Design
1978-82: Princeton University, New Jersey
Shortlisted for Turner Prize 1989 and 1993
2002-07: Professor of painting, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich
Background
Born in Ireland in 1945, Scully’s family move to England when he was four. In 1960 he was apprenticed in a printing shop in London, and joined a graphic design studio. His first visit to America was made in the
early Seventies as John Knox Fellow with a residency at Harvard University. In 1975 Scully was awarded a Harkness Fellowship and established a studio in New York and, in 1983, he became an American Citizen and received
a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The artist
Scully’s early paintings were identified with the vigorous debates of the early 1970s about art and language. From the early 1980s Scully's increasing awareness of the arid effect of formal abstraction led to a simplification
of means with greater breadth of handling and pictorial construction. His paintings superimposed irregular panels of vertical stripes within broad bands of contrasting hues. His progress was distinguished by
a remarkable and sometimes unfashionable commitment to the fundamental concerns of abstract art. Elected RA December 2012.
