Sean Scully (b. 1945) is one of the most internationally celebrated abstract painters working today, whose distinctive compositions of stacked and interlocking bands of color have secured him a substantial place within contemporary art. Born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in London, Scully developed his artistic sensibility through the meeting of two distinct cultural inheritances that would remain visible in his mature practice throughout his life.

Scully pursued his formal artistic training at the Croydon College of Art and then at Newcastle University in England, before eventually completing his MFA at Harvard University in 1972. He emigrated permanently to the United States in 1975 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1983. This transatlantic trajectory placed him at the crossroads of the British and American painting traditions during a formative decade, and his mature practice draws deeply on both.

Scully's paintings from the early 1970s were rigorously geometric and reflected his early engagement with hard-edge abstraction and the Minimalist currents that had transformed American painting during the previous decade. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, he made a decisive turn toward the richly painted, emotionally charged compositions for which he is now best known. His characteristic pictures feature stacked and interlocking rectangular fields of color, arranged into compositions whose apparent simplicity conceals extraordinary subtlety in the relationships between adjacent hues and in the varied painterly touch across each block. His mature works achieve a rare balance between structural discipline and expressive warmth, and they place him within a lineage that reaches back through Mark Rothko to the great European tradition of abstract painting.

Scully has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice and has been the subject of major retrospective exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and important venues throughout Europe and Asia. He is represented by leading international galleries, and his paintings are held in the most significant contemporary art collections worldwide. He continues to work from studios in New York, Barcelona, and Bavaria, extending a practice now spanning more than five decades that has consistently renewed the possibilities of contemporary abstract painting.