Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
April 11, 2022 – July 31, 2022

This comprehensive fifty-year survey exhibition features the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to the present. It will closely examine his contribution to the history of abstract art and his mastery of technique by focusing on the various mediums, motifs, and scales that have defined the artist’s practice over time.

The exhibition will centre on paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels, demonstrating the integral relationships between works in various media, which are rarely exhibited together. Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas premiered in June of 2020 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Scully (American, born in Ireland in 1945) is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and poet. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Harkness Fellowship, as well as a two-time Turner Prize nominee.

Scully’s works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In 2015, Scully participated in the Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition Land Sea at the Palazzo Falier. The upcoming retrospective will be the artist’s first of this scale in the United States since Sean Scully: Twenty Year, 1976-1995, which was presented in 1995 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The artist divides his time between New York, England, and Germany.

more. www.philamuseum.org