Á PARIS... Á ROME... Á BRUXELLES... Á DUBLIN… Á LONDRES…

Sean Scully at the National Gallery of Ireland (National Gallery Dublin text*)

9 May – 20 September 2015 Millennium Wing (rms 1-5)
Admission free

* Sean Scully at the National Gallery of Ireland marks the artist’s 70th birthday. Born in Dublin, Scully, now living and working in New York, retains a powerful sense of Irish identity. He moved to New York at the end of the 1970s and established himself as one of the leading abstract painters of his time. Responding to minimal art of the 1960s and 1970s, Scully has always striven to associate emotions and phenomena of the world into his art, resisting formalism while rigorously reducing the means he employs – a reduced palette of colours and restricting himself to patterns of vertical and horizontal stripes. Scully has always managed to introduce extraordinary variety into his paintings, while their titles often hint at associations with his life or surroundings. This exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland charts the two decades, the 1980s and 1990s and juxtaposes paintings from that period with works, principally multi-part photographic sequences, made over the past decade. The exhibition brings together a group of major paintings on loan from Tate, Arts Council England, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kerlin Gallery, as well as works on paper from a private collection. It also features a single recent ‘window’ painting as a response to the earlier ‘White Window’, and a new photographic work in ten parts. Curator: Sean Rainbird, Director, National Gallery of Ireland. Catalogue: Edited by Sean Rainbird, with contributions by Kelly Grovier and Lochlann Quinn (€14.95, Gallery Shop).

Talks: A series of free talks and tours on Sean Scully and contemporary art will take place in May.
Sean Scully – solo exhibitions in Ireland and overseas Sean Scully at the National Gallery of Ireland, 9 May – 20 September Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Landline, 26 June – 29 August Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Figure-Abstract, 27 June – 12 September Château la Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France, Different Places, opens 3 July

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Sean Scully (b.1945) Born in Dublin, Scully moved with his family to London at the age of four. He was educated at Newcastle University, and Harvard University, Cambridge. Scully’s work is held in more than 180 public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. ; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Tate, London; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20K21, Düsseldorf; Albertina, Vienna; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Instituto Valencia d’Arte Modern, Valencia, Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, and Irish Museum of Modern Art. Sean Scully was elected a Royal Academician in 2013. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1993. Several solo exhibitions are being held in Ireland and overseas to celebrate his 70th birthday in 2015.

Sean Scully lives and works in New York, Barcelona and Munich.

www.sean-scully.com