Sean Scully

Since the 1960s, Sean Scully has made abstract canvases that feature stripes, blocks, and grids painted in rich, evocative hues. His soft edges and uneven paint applications lend a sense of tactility to his compositions, which focus on the complex interplay of material, light, and form. Scully’s work—which also includes printmaking, drawing, watercolor, and sculpture—combines formal rigor with spontaneity, exploring what the artist describes as a tension between system and emotion. Scully has been the subject of solo shows at the Albertina, the National Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Guangdong Museum of Art, and the Central Academy of Fine Art. His work has sold for up to seven figures on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.