Sean Scully valuation
Bands of colour in oil on linen, built out of joined panels rather than composed on one.
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.
What a work by Sean Scully is worth
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Bio
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. He spent a year at Harvard from 1972, and a Harkness Fellowship took him to New York in 1975, where he settled. 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.
Croydon, Newcastle and the Catherine paintings
Scully took evening classes at the Central School of Art from seventeen, then studied full time at Croydon College of Art from 1965 and at Newcastle University from 1968. His first commercial show, at the Rowan Gallery in London, sold out, and he taught at Chelsea and Goldsmiths while painting in a studio in Rotherhithe. The Ikon Gallery in Birmingham gave him his first retrospective in 1981.
The Catherine Paintings, one chosen for each year from 1979 to 1996 and named after his then wife, the artist Catherine Lee, were acquired complete by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2001. Wall of Light began with watercolours made on a beach in Mexico in 1988, and the Wall of Light exhibition opened at the Phillips Collection in 2005 and travelled to the Metropolitan Museum. In 2002 he became professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Backs and Fronts, steel and Santa Cecília
Backs and Fronts, painted in 1981 and shown at PS1 in New York the next year, is the picture with which he broke with Minimalism; Gillian Wearing has said it broke the logjam of American minimalist painting. In 1983 he began working with the printmaker Mohammad O. Khalil, the start of his printmaking, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Why and What (Yellow), of 1988, was the first painting with an inset of steel, and from 1991 he set oil on linen panels into large steel ones.
The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin opened a permanent Sean Scully Room in 2006. Follow the Heart, in 2014, was the first major retrospective by a Western artist in China, and in 2015 he made his first appearance at the Venice Biennale, with Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier, and finished restoring the church of Santa Cecília de Montserrat, with paintings, frescoes, an altar and a cross of his own. Arthur Danto put his name on the shortest of short lists of the major painters of our time.
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