SEAN SCULLY - CHANGE AND HORIZONTALS

Sean Scully (American/Irish, b.1949) is an Irish-born American painter most well-known for his abstracted geometric grid paintings. Born in Dublin, as an infant Scully’s family moved to England, where he was raised and attended school. After attending London’s Croydon College of Art, Scully moved to New York in 1975, where he applied for American citizenship. Using thick applications of paint and rough brushstrokes, Scully creates multi-paneled layered paintings using various striped and checkerboard compositions, reflecting the cool geometric aesthetic of Minimalism, in a rugged, painterly way. In 1989 and again in 1993, Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize, a prestigious honor for such a young artist. Although he has spent almost his entire career working with the idea of the stripe or painted band, Scully’s body of work is complex and extensive, rigorously trying out new compositions and stretching the possibilities of a single motif.