SEAN SCULLY

SEAN SCULLY

Biography

Sean Scully’s last major international exhibitions were held in the Palazzo Falier and in San Giorgio Maggiore in 2015 and 2019 at the Venice Biennale and 2019 in the Museum of Art and Cultural History at Münster. Scully’s monumental canvases, the work on paper and the prints with their specific means of expression, based on the same fundamental vocabulary, are regarded as being of equal importance. „The colour surfaces and their ambivalent interactions are caught in a continual oscillation of repeating constellations that resist conclusive definition, thus providing a sublime demonstration of the dialectics of apparent sameness. Essential is the range and the secret of colour which is dominated by the broken and repeatedly scrambled tones. A further significant aspect consists in Scully’s ability to create a certain kind of light, a light that seems to shine forth from within.“ (Michael Semff, former director of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich) Sean Scully: „In the history of printing there have been some fantastic woodcuts made. The woodcut offered me another possibility. It is like the difference between a watercolor and a pastel. Pastels and woodcuts are more sumptuous, more sensual in a certain way. The japanese paper I used on the Diane Villani woodcuts was beautiful for saturating the paper with the ink.“