Sean Scully Irish-American, b. 1945

Sean Scully is a leading contemporary abstract painter and sculptor best known for his richly textured stripe paintings and monumental Wall of Light series. Working between Europe and the United States, Scully has played a central role in reintroducing emotion, materiality, and human scale into abstraction following the austerity of Minimalism.

Born in Dublin and raised in London, Scully studied at Newcastle University and the Chelsea School of Art before relocating to the United States in the 1970s. Early in his career, his work engaged with hard-edge abstraction and Minimalism, but by the late 1970s and 1980s he began to reject the movement’s impersonal rigor. In its place, Scully developed a more tactile and expressive form of abstraction grounded in layered paint, visible brushwork, and imperfect geometry.

Scully’s signature works are composed of bands, blocks, and grids of color arranged in rhythmic, often architectural compositions. His surfaces are built up through repeated layers of oil paint, resulting in paintings that convey weight, density, and emotional resonance. Color plays a central role in his practice, with muted, earthy tones and deep contrasts evoking landscape, memory, and lived experience rather than optical purity.

The Wall of Light series, begun in the mid-1990s, represents a major development in Scully’s work. Inspired by ancient stone structures and shifting light, these paintings combine stacked rectangular forms into compositions that suggest both stability and vulnerability. While abstract, they carry strong metaphorical associations, reflecting themes of separation, connection, and human presence.

In addition to painting, Scully has produced significant bodies of work in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His sculptural works translate the language of his paintings into three-dimensional form, often using stone or metal to emphasize mass and permanence. Across media, his practice is unified by a commitment to abstraction as an expressive, ethical, and emotional language.

Scully has exhibited widely since the 1980s and has been the subject of major retrospectives internationally. He has also been an influential writer and thinker on abstraction, articulating a vision of modern painting rooted in humanism rather than formal reduction.

Today, Sean Scully is recognized as one of the most important abstract artists of his generation. His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the National Gallery of Art.