Sean Scully Is an Art Star, but He ‘Won’t Bend the Knee for Anyone' – The New York Times

29 August 2024

On a bright summer morning, the Irish-born artist Sean Scully interrupted a small watercolor for a conversation at his sunlit London atelier. The half-finished abstract rested on a trestle table among paint tubes and empty hummus tubs that they had been squeezed into.

Leaning against the walls were large new oils featuring colorful grids and stripes. Though abstract, they somehow evoked the rich scenery of North Africa; one was titled “Fez,” after Morocco’s second city.

Scully is showing several new paintings at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Seoul as part of “Soul,” an exhibition that is to open on Tuesday, just before Frieze Seoul kicks off. And starting Oct. 29, Lisson Gallery in New York will present paintings he made in New York in the early 1980s.

Scully was born in Ireland in 1945 and moved to London when he was 4, settling with his family in a slum. “It was absolutely dire,” he recalled that morning, in an interview at his studio.

The family soon moved in with young Sean’s loving and incredibly resourceful grandmother; he attended a Catholic school with strict but caring nuns. But when the family bought a house in south London, the little boy suddenly found himself in a vicious environment. “There was nothing except fighting, stealing cars, being in a gang and hoping not to get smashed up too often,” he said.

In his teens, he became an apprentice in a printing workshop then a graphic design studio, discovered art, and never looked back. He attended art school in Croydon, in south London, embracing the experience “like somebody who had a religious calling,” then went to Newcastle University. While still a student at Newcastle, he drove a van down to Morocco — wanting to see what Matisse saw — and was entranced for life.

Read the full interview with Farah Nayeri in The New York times here.

Photo by Oliver Mark, The New York Times.