| Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 30 June 1945.
1949-59
Family moves to London.
Grows up in a working-class area of south London and attends local
convent schools. Paintings in Catholic churches have an important
influence on him. The nine-year-old schoolboy wants to become an artist.
Becomes interested in American rhythm and blues music and starts
a music club of his own. Retains his interest in popular music all
his life.
1960-62
Apprenticed at a commercial printing shop in London. Joins a graphic
design studio.
1962-65
Attends evening classes at the Central School of Art, London.
Is interested in figurative painting.
1964
Sees Vincent van Gogh’s painting Chair at Tate Gallery. Its
feeling of honesty has a profound effect.
1965
Decides to dedicate himself entirely to art studies. Studies at
the Croydon College of Art, London, until 1968.
Is interested in van Gogh, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and
Henri Matisse.
Discovers Abstract Expressionism.
1967
Comes across a copy of Mark Rothko’s exhibition catalogue of
1961. Abandons figurative painting altogether. Influenced also by
Bridget Riley’s Op Art.
1968-72
Attends Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. After
graduation remains as teaching assistant. At the same time teaches
one day a week at the Sunderland College of Art.
His technically flawless paintings consist of a complicated grid
system of intersecting bands and lines, which form a rich optical
field. The illusion of depth and space is activated by colour contrasts.
The influence of the Op Art is clearly visible.
Visits Morocco in 1969. The stripes and colours of local textiles
and carpets and the southern light make as deep an impression as
they did on Eugene Delacroix, Matisse and Paul Klee.
1970
Awarded the Stuyvesant Foundation Prize.
1972-73
Awarded the John Knox Fellowship. Makes his first visit to the
United States. Attends Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Experiments
with new techniques. Starts using tape and spray paints in paintings
composed of grids of interlacing vertical and horizontal or diagonal
bands and stripes. All expressiveness is omitted.
1973
After returning to England has his first solo exhibition at the
Rowan Gallery, London.
Sells out the entire show.
Inset #2 means a temporary break in his rigid grid system and prefigures
his device of the inset canvas, which becomes his distinctive feature
from the beginning of the 1980s.
1973-75
Teaches at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and Goldsmith’s
College of Art and Design, London.
1975
Creates Change, a series of 50 acrylic works on paper. The pivotal
series reflects the crises of his personal life. At the same time
it prefigures the large, spatially hermetic dark canvases of the
following years.
Awarded the Harkness Fellowship for two years. Moves to New York.
Lives with the artist Catherine Lee. American art, especially Minimalism,
and his friendship with Robert Ryman encourage him to simplify his
expression.
1977
Has his first solo exhibition in New York at the Duffy-Gibbs Gallery.
1978
Marries painter Catherine Lee.
1978-82
Teaches part-time at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA. Develops
important friendships and contacts in the academic and art world.
At this time his paintings are grey or dark, almost monochrome "Black
paintings”. The composition is pared down to the extreme. Sets
of squares are replaced by thin horizontal or vertical lines.
1979
Decides together with his wife to choose from his works every year
one especially important or typical work to be named after her. This
marks the beginning of his private collection, the Catherine Paintings
series.
1980
Travels to Mexico. Inspired by the trip, he begins painting from
nature, transcribing his experience of colour and light directly
on the paper with watercolours. Before 1980 used watercolour only
occasionally.1981
Has first retrospective at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England.
The exhibition travels within the United Kingdom under the auspices
of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Starts to withdraw from Minimalist aesthetics. Colour and space return.
Stops taping his stripes and starts drawing them freehand. Brushstrokes
are clearly visible. A soft painterly outline becomes characteristic
of his works. Gets his richness of colour by overpainting in many
different layers.
The large polyptych Backs and Fronts, his manifesto painting is completed.
1981-84
Professor at the Parsons School of Art, New York, USA.
1982
Spends part of the summer working at the artists’ colony founded
by Edward Albee at Montauk, Long Island. Produces small works on
panel.
Reaches maturity in Heart of Darkness. Combines rigid geometry with
expressive texture and colour.
1982-83
Uses his inset technique with more freedom. Combines and recombines
canvases to make polyptychs.
1983
Becomes American citizen.
Paul, his nineteen-year-old son from a previous marriage, dies
in a car accident in London.
Receives the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Receives the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Begins his first collaboration with a printer. This prefigures his
long-term commitment to printmaking using various graphic techniques.
1984
International breakthrough.
Dedicates his painting Paul to his deceased son.
Receives the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
Selected for the exhibition entitled An International Survey of
Recent Painting and Sculpture.
1985
Has his first solo exhibition in an American museum the Museum
of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The exhibition
travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.
Major museums acquire large-scale Modernist paintings by Scully at
a time when Postmodernism is the dominant trend.
The paintings become more physical, to the point where they can stand
freely on the floor without any need for support, although they are
conceived to hang on the wall.
1987
Changes to a less complex, flatter and smaller scale of working.
Uses the inset for the first time by embedding a small canvas into
a large one.
1987-90
Makes a number of visits to Mexico. Exposure to new sources of
visual stimuli can be seen in new watercolours and works on paper.
1988
Introduces an element of steel for the first time.
1989
Has his first solo exhibition in a European museum at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery, London. The exhibition travels to Palacio Velázquez,
Madrid and to Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
1990
Maurice Poirier’s monograph is published by Hudson Hills Press,
New York. Photographs by Scully published for the first time, in
black and white as illustrations and in colour in the paintings section.
1991
Starts to incorporate his insets into large steel frames.
Returns to the checkerboard motif, which he used quite early in
his oeuvre.
1992
In December revisits Morocco to make a film for the BBC on Matisse,
who visited Morocco in 1912-13.
Lectures at Harvard.
1993
Has his first exhibition of the Catherine Paintings in the Museum
of Modern Art of Fort Worth, Texas.
1994
Makes first paintings at his new studio in Barcelona.
1995
Participates in the Joseph Beuys Lectures 1995 on the state of
contemporary art in Britain, Europe and the United States, Ruskin
School of Drawing
and Fine Art, Oxford University, England.
Starts making three-dimensional Floating Paintings. These are rectangular
vertical sheet metal boxes attached to the wall along one of the
narrowest sides. The other sides are covered by painted vertical
stripes.
1996
Visits Morocco. The portfolio Atlas Walls of 1998 includes several
photos from this trip.
1997
Photographs exhibited for the first time, Sala de Exposiciones
Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain.
1998
Participates in a colloquium held in conjunction with the exhibition "Richard
Pousette-Dart (1916-1992)”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York.
1999
Visits Santo Domingo. The portfolio Santo Domingo for Nené consists
of photos taken during this trip.
Paints Chelsea Wall, the first painting in the new studio in Chelsea,
New York City.
2000
Becomes an Honorary Fellow of the London Institute of Arts and
Letters.
2001
Becomes a member of Aosdána, an Irish affiliation of artists
engaged in literature, music and the visual arts.
2002
Starts working as a part-time professor of painting at Akademie
der Bildenden Künste, Munich, Germany.
2003
Receives the degree of an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the
Massachusetts College of Art, the United States, and the National
University of Ireland. Lives and works in New York, Barcelona and
Munich.
Sources:
Adams, Brooks: The Stripe Strikes Back. Art in America. October
1985. P. 119-123.
Biographie. Sean Scully. Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. 8 octobre – 1er
décembre 1996. Paris.
Danto, Arthur C.: Between the Lines: Sean Scully on Paper. Sean
Scully. Works on Paper. 1975-1996. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung
München. 26 September-24 November 1996.
Martino, Victoria: Out of the Heart of Darkness. Sean Scully. Prints.
Catalogue Raisonné 1968-1999. Gand. 1999.
Müller, Maria: "…von Dingen, die ich im Verbeigehen
sehe.” Zu den Fotografien Sean Scullys. Sean Scully. Gemälde,
Pastelle, Aquarelle, Fotografien 1990-2000. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Düsseldorf 17. März – 4. Juni 2001. Düsseldorf.
2001.
Ratcliff, Carter: Sean Scully and Modernist Painting. The Constitutive
Image. Art in America. May 1993. P. 31.
Rifkin, Ned: Introduction. Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976-1995.
Singapore. 1995.
Semff, Michael: The Dialectics of Sameness: Sean Scully’s
Pastels and Watercolours. Sean Scully. Works on Paper. 1975-1996.
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München. 26 September-24 November
1996.
Zweite, Armin: Abstraktion und authentische Erfahrung. Doppelstrategien
im Oeuvre Sean Scullys. Gemälde, Pastelle, Aquarelle, Fotografien
1990-2000. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf 17.
März – 4. Juni 2001. Düsseldorf. 2001.
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