Night

American-Irish artist Sean Scully is best known for his abstract paintings and prints, which seem to synthesize the traditions of classical European painting with the expressive impact of American abstract expressionism through a rigorous yet intuitive approach to artistic practice. Most of his works follow a rhythmic structure of interconnected areas or rectangles of colour reminiscent of striped or checkerboard patterning. His canvases are often built up with a heavy impasto and seem to glow with a sense of agency, not unlike the work of the
nineteenth century post-impressionists or twentieth century colour-field painters. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Scully moved to London with his family. 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 and went on to receive a graduate fellowship at the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, in the early 1970s. 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.