Sean Scully & Romanesque Architecture
Sean Scully at Église-Saint-Nicolas in Caen, France. June 21 through September 22, 2024. © Sean Scully. Photography by Cécile Schuhmann. Images courtesy of the artist, Église-Saint-Nicolas in Caen, and Lisson Gallery.
Sean Scully, Stack Blues (In Honor of Arthur Danto), 2018. Aluminum and automotive paint, 9 by 4 by 4 ft. (274 by 122 by 122 cm). © Sean Scully. Broadway and 117th Street. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
“The Broadway Mall Association’s public art exhibition, Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle, will open on Upper Broadway in July 2024. The installation will showcase the work of internationally renowned abstract artist Sean Scully (American, born Ireland 1945) with seven sculptures of varying materials at seven locations along the green malls at the center of Broadway between Lincoln Square and Washington Heights. The exhibition, on view into March 2025, is organized in partnership with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program and Lisson Gallery, with assistance from the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District. This is the fourteenth sculpture show presented by the Broadway Mall Association since 2005.”
“Scully is creating two of the seven sculptures specifically for this project.”
Press release text courtesy of Broadway Mall Association as well as Lisson Gallery, NYC Parks’ Art, and Sean Scully Studio. © Sean Scully.
“I’m trying to turn stone into light . . . to make a wall that is not a brutal divider.” —Sean Scully
Sean Scully: Wall of Light Land, installation views at Lisson Gallery in Beijing. © Sean Scully. Images courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
Sean Scully: LA Deep, installation views at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles. © Sean Scully. Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
Sean Scully: Landline Weave
Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin | June 3 through September 30, 2023
Sean Scully: Landline Weave, installation views at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin. © Sean Scully. Images courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
Sean Scully: Looking Back and Forth
Sean Scully, Harvard Frame Painting, 1972. Acrylic, sacking, resin, felt, and wood, 72 by 72 inches. © Sean Scully. Image courtesy of the artist.
Sean Scully, Hidden Drawing 10.1.75, 1975. Acrylic and tape on canvas, 96 by 96 inches. © Sean Scully. Image courtesy of the artist.
Sean Scully, Why and What Yellow, 1988. Oil on linen with steel, 96 by 120 inches. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Washington, DC. © Sean Scully. Image courtesy of the artist.
Sean Scully, Landline Blue, 1999. Oil on linen, 96 by 84 inches. © Sean Scully. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image above © Sean Scully and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Courtesy of the artist and Houghton Hall.
SEAN SCULLY
GEOMETRY
FACTURE
FRACTURE
“Art does not need to make sense or to function or to demonstrate any particular idea. It testifies to the beauty of imperfect human thought and action muddled up with feeling.” —Sean Scully
Sean Scully, For the Day Before, 2022. Oil on aluminum, 85 by 75 inches (215.9 by 190.5 cm) each. Courtesy of Sean Scully Studio.
Above quote: Sean Scully, “Art” (2000), in Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interview of Sean Scully, eds. Kelly Grovier and Faye Fleming (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2016), p. 78.
Sean Scully: Material World
Sean Scully, Glass Stack 2, 2020. Murano glass, 270 by 105 by 105 cm (106.3 by 41.3 by 41.3 inches). Collection of the artist. © Sean Scully and Thorvaldsen Museum. Courtesy of the artist and the Thorvaldsen Museum.
Thorvaldsen Museum
Copenhagen, Denmark
September 2, 2022 – March 5, 2023
Curated by Per Haubro Jensen
“Scully’s paintings are known for their extraordinary coloristic intensity combined with simple, abstract shapes. His sculptures are built from horizontal and vertical structures in materials such as stone, wood, zinc and glass, and his work is characterized by an ever-present exchange between the intimate and the monumental.”
—Thorvaldsen Museum
Sean Scully: The Passenger
A Retrospective Exhibition
November 16, 2022—March 12, 2023 at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
Sean Scully: The Passenger—A Retrospective Exhibition. © Sean Scully. Images courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia.
Sean Scully
Wall Dale Cubed, 2018
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Guston/Morandi/Scully
Installation view of Guston/Morandi/Scully, curated by Sukanya Rajaratnam at Mnuchin Gallery, September 8 - October 15, 2022.
Photography by Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Guston, Morandi, Scully: three degrees of painterliness in exploring the circuitous phenomenology of vision.
© Sean Scully and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Images courtesy of the artist and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.
© Sean Scully and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Images courtesy of the artist and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 11 — July 31, 2022
“I want the person looking at it to try and put it together.”
—Sean Scully
SEAN SCULLY:
VISCERAL GEOMETRY
In contrast to the sharp linearity of Final Grey 2/3 of 1974 currently on view, the most recently executed works of Sean Scully at once sustain and renew the artist’s effusive and lyrical portrayals of geometry since 1980. The surfaces and lines of Scully’s pictorial fields manifest arresting instances of the expressive, gestural and highly painterly that nonetheless forge orderly, architectonic configurations.
Sean Scully: Visceral Geometry
© Liliane Tomasko and Sean Scully. Images courtesy of Liliane Tomasko, Sean Scully and Newlands House. Photography by Barney Hindle.
The works of Liliane Tomasko and Sean Scully in this thought-provoking exhibition invite us to probe the meaning of abstract art as fluidly as the gestural marks that govern the surfaces of the paintings, as openly as their expressive signs. For Tomasko and Scully, the creative act is aimed to persist within the spectator’s perceptual field.
Sean Scully, Oisín Sea Green, 2016. Oil on aluminum, 85 by 75 inches. Photograph by Christoph Knoch. © Sean Scully. Image courtesy of the artist.
Golden Frieze, 2018, glass mosaic, 130 ft. long. Art in Embassies Permanent Collection. U.S. Embassy London, UK. Courtesy of Sean Scully Studio.
Sean Scully, “The Figure” (2000), in Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interview of Sean Scully, eds. Kelly Grovier and Faye Fleming (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2016), pp. 18-79, p. 79.