41 Facts About Sean Scully

Sean Scully was born on 30 June 1945 and is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer.

Sean Scully's work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 30 June 1945.

In 1963, at the age of 18, Sean Scully had a job loading trucks with flattened boxes at a cardboard factory.

Sean Scully was influenced by a trip to Morocco in 1969, where he became fascinated by the multi-colored stripes locals wove into wool tents and robes.

Sean Scully was awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship in 1972 to attend Harvard University.

In 1975, at the age of 30, Sean Scully was awarded a two-year Harkness Fellowship with which he moved to New York.

Once in New York, Minimalism had a strong influence on his work, and for a few years Sean Scully's palette was reduced to the grey monochrome 'Black paintings' series.

Sean Scully began working on the series known as The Catherine Paintings in 1979, while sharing his Duane Street studio with his third wife, the artist Catherine Lee.

The idea behind the series was to choose the important painting Sean Scully produced during each year together, that would then become part of a collection named after her.

Sean Scully had a breakthrough with the seminal 1981 painting Backs and Fronts, which had a profound impact in the 1982 exhibition 'Critical Perspectives' at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center.

In 1982 Sean Scully began to work with the gallerist David McKee, an important relationship that lasted for a decade.

Sean Scully began applying a combination of rigid geometry and expressive texture and color to larger paintings that year.

Sean Scully began collaborating with Mohammad O Khalil in 1983, this was the first time he had collaborated with a printmaker and was the start of a career-long commitment to printmaking.

Sean Scully began the regular use of a checkerboard motif at this time, first hinted at in his Taped and Hidden Drawing paintings of the mid 1970s.

In 1992, while teaching at Harvard University, Sean Scully revisited Morocco to film the BBC documentary The Artist's Journey: Sean Scully on Henri Matisse, with Matisse having visited Morocco in 1912 - 1913.

In 1995 Sean Scully returned to New York, moving into a large new studio in Chelsea, Manhattan.

Sean Scully received a number of invitations to speak at academic institutions, and participated in the Joseph Beuys lectures on the state of contemporary art in Britain, Europe and the US, held by the Ruskin School at Oxford University, England.

In 1997, Sean Scully's photography was exhibited for the first time at the Sala de Exposiciones Rekalde in Bilbao, Spain.

Sean Scully participated in a colloquium in conjunction with the exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998.

Sean Scully visited Santo Domingo in 1999, resulting in the photography portfolio Santa Domingo for Nene.

That year, Sean Scully's prints were given a retrospective at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna, Austria, and the Musee du Dessin et de l'Estampe Originale in Gravelines.

In 2002 Sean Scully was appointed Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, a position he held through to 2007.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC invited Sean Scully to give the Elson Lecture in 2007.

The retrospective exhibition Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed: The Imagery of Sean Scully opened in 2009 at the MKM Museum Kuppersmuhlefur Moderne Kunst, in Duisburg, Germany, and traveled to the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

In 2014, Sean Scully opened a new studio space set in three acres in Tappan, New York, where he continued to extend the Landline series of painting begun in 2000.

That same year, Sean Scully opened fourteen solo exhibitions around the world, including the first major retrospective by a western artist in China.

The exhibition, entitled Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully, opened in Beijing.

Sean Scully participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time, in 2015, with the solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier in Venice.

The Museum Liaunig, in Neuhaus, Austria, opened its new building expansion with Sean Scully: Painting as an Imaginative World Appropriation.

In 2015 Sean Scully completed his restoration of the 10th Church of Santa Cecilia de Montserrat in Spain, and opened it to the public.

Sean Scully was awarded the V Congreso Asociacion Protecturi for his contribution to Spanish religious heritage.

Sean Scully revisited his early exploration in figuration from the late 1960s in a series of figurative paintings titled Eleuthera which was completed between 2015 and 2017.

Sean Scully has been a member of Aosdana since 2001, and the Royal Academy of Arts since 2013.

Sean Scully received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from both Massachusetts College of Art and the National University of Ireland in 2003, and a Doctor of Letters degree from Newcastle University.

Sean Scully received an Honorary Doctorate from Miguel Hernandez University in 2006 and 2008.

Scully's mother Holly was a Vaudeville singer, and Sean Scully became heavily influenced by rhythm and blues in his adolescence.

In 2019 the duo Merzouga released a 46' sound-composition "The Language of Light - Music to the Work of Sean Scully" featuring the texts and the voice of Sean Scully.

Sean Scully first began writing about art and his own work in the 1980s, although he only truly began to include writing as part of his practice from 1996 onwards.

Sean Scully became a father at the age of 19, with the birth of his son Paul on May 7,1965.

Sean Scully married artist Catherine Lee in 1978, the two divorced in 1998.