Sean Scully b. 1945

Sean Scully RA is an Irish-born abstract painter and printmaker, now based in the USA, who has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee.

Scully was born in Dublin and raised in South London. He studied at Croydon College of Art (1965-68) and Newcastle University (1968-72). He was a recipient of the Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard in the early 1970s and a Harkness Fellowship in 1975, subsequently settling in New York. In 1989, Scully was first nominated for the Turner Prize, with a second nomination in 1993. In 2006 Scully donated eight of his paintings to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which opened an extension that year with a room dedicated to Scully's works. In 2015 he restyled Santa Cecilia Chappel next to Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia. Scully has held teaching posts at Chelsea School of Art and Design, Goldsmith’s College, Princeton University and was a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

He has exhibited worldwide, with recent solo exhibitions including 'Resistance and Persistence', Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts (both 2016) and Hubei Museum of Art (10 January – 12 March 2017); 'Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964–2014', Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, travelling to CAFA, Beijing (2014–15); 'Sean Scully – Figure/Abstract', Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, travelling to Kunsthalle Rostock, Germany and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2014–15); a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Ireland; 'Different Places', Château la Coste, Aix-en-Provence; 'Land Sea', part of the 56th Venice Biennale; 'Sean Scully – Malerei als Weltaneignung', Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus, Austria and 'Sean Scully 1974–2015', Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paolo, Brazil, all 2015.

Scully is represented in the permanent collections of a number of museums and public galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the National Gallery of Australia, the Tate Gallery, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, UBS, and many other private and public collections worldwide.