Photo of artist Sean Scully at MOMA

Sean Scully

1st December 2020

Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1945 and later moved to a working-class part of South London, becoming an apprentice commercial typesetter at age 15. At 20, he started full-time at Croydon College of Art, London, before moving to Newcastle University in 1968. In 1970 Scully won the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation prize. Also in 1972, he was a runner-up in that year’s edition of the John Moores Painting Prize, and was awarded the Frank Knox fellowship to attend Harvard University. In 1975, at the age of 30, Scully was awarded a two-year Harkness Fellowship with which he moved to New York.

Scully’s work is in the collections of nearly every major museum around the world. In 2014, he became the only Western artist to have had a career-length retrospective exhibition in China. In 2018 he was awarded the International Artist of the Year Prize in Hong Kong. Recent solo exhibitions include Landline at the Hirshhorn and Wadsworth Atheneum, USA; Vita Duplex at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, and LWL-Museum for Art and Culture, Münster; Sea Star at The National Gallery, London; HUMAN at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice for the 58th Venice Art Biennale.

2020-2021 solo exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; INSIDEOUTSIDE at fellow artist Anthony Cragg’s Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Germany; and a major retrospective The Shape of Ideas at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, which travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania in 2022.

Sean Scully lives and works between New York and Bavaria.

Photo credit Raphy Sarkissian. Courtesy Sean Scully.

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