"A succinct account of the life and art of Sean Scully, widely considered to be one of the leading abstract painters of our time. This work sets his entire output within a detailed biographical framework, closely examining the relationship between the artist's paintings and his lesser-known drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints-areas of Scully's production that are rarely considered together"--
Sean Scully is among the greatest abstract painters of our age. He is also one of the most outspoken. Since the late 1960s, Scully's visual expressiveness has been matched by a verbal dynamism that is no less arresting than his art. Varying widely in form from brief reflections of compressed eloquence to essay-long meditations on artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Giorgio Morandi and Mark Rothko, Scully's writings are distinguished by a brutal lyricism and the effortlessness of their aphoristic turn of phrase. At once biographical and political, poignant and unflinching, the nearly 200 texts that comprise Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully provide a unique perspective on one of the most engaging artistic imaginations of the past half century. Here, readers will discover the effusions of a mind tirelessly wrestling with the profoundest issues of art, cultural history, and what it means to be a creator in the contemporary world. The volume will be accompanied by key images illustrating Scully's words as well as facsimile reproductions of handwritten pages by the artist into which drawings have been integrated.
Sean Scully's abstract paintings are world-famous. In them he moves far beyond a purely formal confrontation with color, form, plane, and light by also incorporating his attitudes to-ward art, society, ethics, and metaphysics. To date, however, little attention has been paid to the fact that he also creates sculptures. For these, Scully layers elements made of steel, stone, bronze, and painted aluminum on top of each other, creating horizontal structures that expand upward, yet are also linked to the stripes in his paintings. This monograph is now the first to compile Scully's important sculptures in a sin-gle volume. Besides numerous pictures, it also contains exten-sive essays about his work.
A catalogue of the recent exhibition featuring Scully's 'Landline' paintings, which address the artist's preoccupation with the horizon. Sean Scully is one of the most important abstract artists of our time. His new publication, Landlines and other recent works, accompanies the artist's major solo exhibition at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, and centres on three important bodies of work: Doric, Landline and Eleuthera, Scully's first representational works in half a century. The publication also presents a generous selection of previously unseen early works, illustrating the world-renowned painter's development as an artist. High-quality photography illustrates the artworks both individually and in situ at the De Pont Museum's unique exhibition space. The book also includes three exemplary pieces of critical writing; Rudi Fuchs gives a rigorous analysis of Scully's robust and architectural Doric series of paintings, Kelly Grovier contributes an extensive, melodic text tracing the deep roots of Scully's recent figurative paintings, while Declan Long reflects upon Scully's undulating Landline series of paintings.
A new, compact edition of Sean Scully’s photographs, featuring horizontal and vertical shards of limestone that echo his painted work and reveal a creative process best expressed through abstract shapes. Sean Scully, one of today’s most esteemed painters and an accomplished photographer, spent time on the remote Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, photographing the ancient drystone walls that crisscross the stark and barren landscape. Sean Scully brings together his sensitive images, revealing the unexpected yet monumental beauty of these centuries-old structures that meander across the windswept and rocky islands. In their form and spirit, the photographs shed light on Scully’s own sensibilities as an artist. They also capture the stillness and serenity of this rugged, timeless place on the edge of Europe. This new edition features an evocative text by the award-winning Irish writer Colm To´ibi´n, which conveys the mysterious beauty of the three Aran Islands. This volume is a must-have for Sean Scully fans, as well as anyone with an interest in Ireland or photography.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Sean Scully has gained international prominence as one of the most admired contemporary abstract painters today. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, Scully's great achievement is the reinvigoration of abstract painting with the metaphorical, the philosophical and the sublime combined with the earthy tangibility of paint. From his precisely gridded works of the 1970s to the three-dimensional panels of the 1980s and his now celebrated Wall of Light paintings from the 1990s, this volume gathers the entire oeuvre of the artist, whose work is held in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; and the Tate, London. Elected a Royal Academician in 2013, Scully has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice, in 1989 and in 1993. He lives and works in New York, Barcelona, and Munich.
Painter, photographer, watercolorist, and printmaker Sean Scully roams the world with his camera, capturing its surfaces in places as far-flung as Mexico and the Aran Islands, as close to home as his own studio. His photographs sometimes consist of close-up shots of his own paintings, wherein he zooms in on the material reality of his richly painted surfaces and transforms their colors and shapes into a different abstract configuration. More often, Scully goes from recognizable objects in the larger world to subjective impressions of them. Snapshots of façades, windows, and doors are never straightforward recordings of architectural elements. By depicting fading walls, cracked surfaces, rough edges, and the deep shadows created by them, these images capture beauty in decay, and evoke the basic contradiction of nature and life: solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. As metaphors of physical and mental conditions, the photographs capture the memories, feelings, and thoughts connected to the experience of that reality. It is precisely this continuing interchange of the recognizable and abstract worlds, the visible and the invisible, that empowers Scully's works in all media.
