BARCELONA, SPAIN.-The Joan Miró Foundation presents the Sean Scully exhibition, a co-production with the Musée d’art moderne in Saint Étienne and the MACRO in Rome, containing over 100 works that include paintings, pastels, drawings and photographs by the artist from public and private collections around the world. The pieces have been selected by Rosa Maria Malet, director of the Foundation, in conjunction with Sean Scully.

The show covers the last thirty years of Scully’s career and aims to bring to the public the work of a contemporary artist who has remained faithful to the tradition of painting, with conviction, with his own personality and with a solid output.

Sean Scully (Dublin, 1945) is one of the artists who has enjoyed widest acclaim in the field of painting. In his work he combines references to various pictorial styles – Geometrical Abstraction, Minimalist Art, Conceptual Art and Abstract Expressionism, among others – while at the same time creating his own highly personal language with essentially pictorial values.

Scully’s abstract paintings, however, retain a link with the forms, textures and colours of everyday life. The rectangular shapes denote his heightened sense of composition, with balanced proportions and a constant dialogue between colours. There is also a temporal dimension to his work, achieved by the depth created by the superimposition of forms. Gesture, too, is present in the distribution of the rectangles that demarcate the space and imbue his art with emotion.

The photographs show the world that lies at the root of Scully’s paintings, to which they are closely linked: houses with colourful doors and windows, and walls painted in different tones. One of his latest series of photographs is of the dry-stone walls on the Aran islands in Ireland, in black-and-white but nonetheless with close links to Scully’s painting. They clearly reveal the painter’s eye behind the lens.

The exhibition will also be shown at the Musée d’art moderne in Saint Étienne, from early February to 30 March 2008, and afterwards at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO) from 18 April to 17 August 2008.

The catalogue, containing articles by Rosa Maria Malet, director of the Joan Miró Foundation; Lorand Hegyi, director of the Musée d’art moderne in Saint Étienne; Danilo Eccher, director of the MACRO in Rome; Maria Lluïsa Borràs and Donald Kuspit, will be published by Thames & Hudson in two editions, one in English and the other in Catalan and Spanish.