Sean Scully was born in 1945 in Dublin and grew up in London. He became a US citizen in 1983. Today, he is resident in New York, Barcelona and Munich. Under the influence of Mark Rothko, he abandoned representational painting at an early stage. Ever since, the direct language of the brush, shapes that are exclusively geometrical figures and a deft play with colours that ranges from delicate nuances and glazes to powerful and direct applications of colours has been the essence of Scully’s work. Although his pictures were initially strictly two-dimensional, they began to extend into the third dimension in the 1980s. He paints on box-shaped objects with projections and recesses. Today, he often works on metal plates, sometimes combining them with canvases. This book focuses on his current output, which the artist himself sums up thus: “All my life, I have been driven by some guilt or other. It is only in the past few years that this has ended … and I increasingly like myself better for it. I only do things that I really want to do. This has caused me to attempt big things.”

With contribution by Matthias Frehner, Stella Rollig, Annick Haldemann und Brigitte Reutner.