Sean Scully RA (born 30 June 1945) is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer.

[5] From the age of 17 until he turned 20, despite working full-time in various jobs including graphic design, and messenger, Scully attended evening classes at the Central School of Art, focused on figurative painting.

[9] In September 1965 Sean Scully, age 20, began to study full-time at Croydon College of Art, London, before moving on to Newcastle University in 1968.

[11] Scully was also influenced by a trip to Morocco in 1969, where he became fascinated by the multi-colored stripes locals wove into wool tents and robes.

During this period Scully taught at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, and Goldsmith's, while continuing to paint in his Elephant Lane studio in Rotherhithe.

Scully's response in the 1970s had been to bring the objectives of American Minimalism together with those of Op art, an important current in Europe, creating works using overlays and “supergrids” that bridged these two artistic movements in a new way.

[17] Once in New York, Minimalism had a strong influence on his work, and for a few years, Scully's palette was reduced to the grey monochrome ‘Black paintings’ series.

[20] He made multiple trips to Morocco and Mexico during this time, as he considered these trips to have “a direct bearing on what I think art should be doing – which is concentrating on what’s interesting, engaging, perverse, and beautiful about human nature.”[21] He later commented that “I had decided that what had been stripped out of painting—i.e., the ability to make relationships, to be metaphorical and referential, spiritual, poetic, all those things and aspects of human nature—had to be put back in if painting was to go forward.”[22] In 1981 the first retrospective of Sean Scully's work was held at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

[23] This was also the year that Scully's confidence to withdraw from adherence to Minimalism became apparent, with the return of color and space, and the freehand drawing of stripes and visible brushstrokes, rather than the hard lines of tape.

[24] Scully had a breakthrough with the seminal 1981 painting Backs and Fronts, which had a profound impact in the 1982 exhibition 'Critical Perspectives' at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center.

During the summer of that year, Scully started producing small multi-panel works on found pieces of wood while staying in Montauk at the Edward Albee artist's colony.

[28] By 1987, Scully's work became less complex, flatter and smaller in scale, and began to include lighter color palettes beginning with Pale Fire in 1988.

[29] In 1989 the Whitechapel Gallery in London held a solo exhibition for Scully, which then travelled to Palacio Velázquez in Madrid and to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.

[32] Scully received a number of invitations to speak at academic institutions, and participated in the Joseph Beuys lectures on the state of contemporary art in Britain, Europe and the US, held by the Ruskin School at Oxford University, England.

That year, Scully's prints were given a retrospective at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna, Austria, and the Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe Originale in Gravelines.

A retrospective exhibition opened in 2004 at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, which travelled to Klassik Stiftung Weimar, in Germany, and the National Gallery of Australia.

In 2006 the Hugh Lane Gallery opened The Sean Scully Room, a dedicated, permanent installation of the artist's work, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France held an exhibition of his prints.

[34] Sean Scully: A Retrospective opened in 2007 at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and travelled to the Musée d'art moderne (Saint-Étienne), and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO) in Rome.

In 2014, Scully opened a new studio space set on three acres in Tappan, New York, where he continued to extend the Landline series of paintings begun in 2000.

[39] That same year, Scully opened fourteen solo exhibitions around the world, including the first major retrospective by a western artist in China.

[42] The Museum Liaunig, in Neuhaus, Austria, opened its new building expansion with Sean Scully: Painting as an Imaginative World Appropriation.

Commissioned by the Museum of Montserrat to make a holistic artistic intervention in the sacred space, Scully not only permanently installed paintings but worked on site-specific frescoes, and the design of the altar and cross.

Inspired by revisiting his earlier works, Scully began to reemploy techniques such as spray painting, which he first introduced in the late 1960s.

The series was inspired by Scully's son Oisin, and was named after the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas and the feminine Greek adjective ἐλεύθερος (eleútheros), meaning "free".