A little bit more about Sean Scully's life.

Sean Scully is a leading representative of a new generation of abstract painters that emerged towards the end of the twentieth century.  His work is strongly acclaimed, and has been exhibited in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Galleria de Arte Moderna, Bologna and Gallerie Jeu de Paume, Pais.

Sean Scully has moved steadily over the past three decades to his current position in the highest rank of painters working in the abstract tradition.  Scully began painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the dominance of Op Art in Britain. He then moved to America, where, after five years of struggle, he found his painterly voice in the stripe. Scully has relentlessly pursued the possibilities offered by his exploration of colored stripes, always remaining true to his assertion that "the stripe is a signifier of modernism."

Sean Scully's life time line:

1945

Born in Dublin, Ireland

1949

Family emigrates to London

1960

Apprentices in a commercial printing shop in London and joins a graphic design studio

1962-65

Attends evening classes at the Central School of Art, London with an interest in figurative painting

1965-68

Studies painting at the Croydon College of Art, London

1967

Discovers a 1961 Mark Rothko exhibition catalogue and immediately abandons figurative painting altogether

1968-1972

Bachelor of Arts at Newcastle University, England with First Class Honours, remains as a teaching assistant. Also teaches one day a week at the Sunderland College of Art. Creates large scale paintings composed of a complicated intersecting line and grid system resulting in an multilayered optical field

1969

Travels to Morocco. The stripes and colours of local textiles and the southern light makes a deep impression.

1972-1973

Makes first visit to America as recipient of John Knox Fellowship with a residency at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Experiments with new techniques and exhibits new works upon return to London

1973

First major solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London. Show sells out

1973-1975

Holds teaching positions at Chelsea School of Art and Design and Goldsmith’s College of Art and Design, London

1975

Emigrates to the United States

1977

First New York solo exhibition at the Duffy-Gibbs Gallery

1978-1982

Adjunct professor at Princeton University, New Jersey

Develops important friendships and contacts in the academic and art world

1980

Travels to Mexico. Inspired by the trip, begins using watercolor to transcribe the experience of colour and light directly onto paper

1981

First retrospective at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England. The exhibition travels within the United Kingdom under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Stops work on Minimalist series. Stops taping stripes and starts painting them freehand. Brushstrokes become clearly visible. Color and space return. Color is explored extensively through layering and over-painting.

Completes the large (20 ft, 11 panel) manifesto painting Backs and Fronts, 1981

1982

Summer residency at the Edward Albee artists’ colony in Montauk, Long Island where he produces small composite works on found panels, piecing together disparate shapes and thickness to create architectural paintings.

Back in New York, paints first mature work, the triptych Heart of Darkness combining rigid geometry with expressive texture and color

1983

Becomes an American Citizen. Receives a Guggenheim Fellowship

1984

Awarded an NEA Artist's Fellowship. International breakthrough, marked by his inclusion in the MOMA’s group exhibition An international survey of recent paintings and sculptures

1985

First solo exhibition in an American museum: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. Major museums begin to acquire his large-scale Modernist paintings at a time when Postmodernism was the big trend. The paintings become more physical, architectural and aggressive

1987

Adds new body of work to include less complex, flatter and smaller scale paintings. First use of the inset technique - embedding a small canvas into a larger one

1987-1990

Visits Mexico multiple times. Works on paper show influence of new sources of visual stimuli

1988

Steel is introduced into the paintings

1989

First solo exhibition and tour in a European museum. Exhibition travels from the Whitechapel Gallery, London to Palacio Velázquez, Madrid, and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich

Shortlisted for the Turner Prize, alongside Paula Rego, Lucian Freud and Richard Long

1992

Revisits Morocco in December to make a film on Matisse for the BBC

1993

Shortlisted a second time for the Turner Prize, alongside Hannah Collins, Vong Phaophanit and Rachel Whiteread

Catherine Paintings exhibited for the first time at The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas

1994

New studio in Barcelona, Spain

1999

New studio in Chelsea, New York

2000

Made an Honorary Member of the London Institute of Arts and Letters.

2002-07

Professor of painting at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, Germany

2003

Receives Honorary Degrees, Doctorate of Fine Arts from The Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and the National University of Ireland, Dublin 

2005-06

Sean Scully Wall of Light exhibition and tour at The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York

2006

Dublin City Gallery/ The Hugh Lane, Dublin, opens the Sean Scully Gallery, a permanent installation of paintings by the artist

2007

Marries painter Liliane Tomasko

2007-08

Sean Scully A Retrospective exhibition and tour at Miro Foundation, Barcelona; Musée d’Art Moderne, Sainte-Etienne, and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO), Rome.

Awarded Honorary Degree, Doctor Honoris Causa, Universitas Miguel Hernandez, Valencia.

Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C

2009

Retrospective exhibition and tour Konstantinopel oder die versteckte Sinnlichkeit. Die Bilderwelt von Sean Scully (Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed. The Imagery of Sean Scully) at MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg and Ulster Museum, Belfast

Son Oisín is born

2010

Tour of important early works: Works from the 1980s at VISUAL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow and Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds.

Awarded Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters by Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

Currently lives  and works in New York, Barcelona and outside Munich

Sources:

SEAN SCULLY -- BODY OF WORK 1964-2011.11.09. Web. 08 Nov. 2011. <http://www.sean-scully.com/en/biography/>.

"Sean Scully | Artist | Big Think." Big Think | Blogs, Articles and Videos from the World's Top Thinkers and Leaders. Web. 08 Nov. 2011. <http://bigthink.com/seanscully>.