Sean Scully valuation

Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and grew up in London, leaving school at fifteen and coming to painting through evening classes, then Croydon and Newcastle. A Harkness Fellowship took him to Harvard in 1972 and he settled in New York in 1975. The early work was hard-edged and taped; from the early 1980s he abandoned that for the manner he has kept since — broad bands of colour in oil on linen, brushed so the edges breathe, and assembled from separate stretched panels of differing depth that are joined or inset, so that a painting is constructed rather than composed inside a single rectangle. Wall of Light, which came out of watercolours made in Mexico, and the later Landline paintings are the two series most often named. He has twice been shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

Paintings in oil on linen lead, with works on aluminium and copper alongside them, and the construction is the thing to look at: the joins between panels, the edges and the depth of the stretchers are part of the work and are where handling damage shows first. Pastels, watercolours and photographs form a substantial second body, and the print output — aquatints and woodcuts, well published and well documented — is the accessible end. The artist is living and the studio keeps the records that confirm a work's details.