CORK.- Crawford Art Gallery presents Seán Scully: Figure/Abstract, a career-spanning exhibition by Ireland’s most pre-eminent artist.

Seán Scully has achieved international acclaim as an abstract artist, yet Figure/Abstract is the first exhibition of his work to include his early figurative drawings and paintings. The earliest works date back to 1964, when Scully was nineteen. Anyone familiar with his monumental abstract paintings may be surprised to find that these early works are so modest in scale and feature such domestic subjects as a dog and a cat, as well as sketches of his brother Tony. Most of the works in Figure/Abstract have never been shown before.

Figure/Abstract (June 27 – September 12) demonstrates how Scully’s interest in figuration continued to develop alongside his early explorations in abstraction throughout the 1960s, before he began making the large abstract paintings that have occupied him since the early 1970s.

The exhibition also features works on canvas - including Untitled -Seated Figure (1967); Backcloth (1970) and Inset (1973)– which together demonstrate how Scully’s conversion to abstraction drove his development as one of the most original painters of our times. Scully is today best known for his epic ‘stripe’ paintings, and the exhibition features a recent work from this series, Horizontal Soul, 2014, which is more than eight metres in length.

To mark the occasion, and to celebrate Scully’s achievements as an Irish artist on the international stage, the Crawford Art Gallery restored the síneadh fada over the ‘a’ in the spelling of Seán for the duration of the exhibition Figure/ Abstract in Cork.

Sean Scully
Seán Scully was born in Dublin in 1945. His family moved to London when he was four. He studied art at Croydon College of Art and the University of Newcastle, graduating in 1971. His first exhibition in London, in 1973, was a critical and commercial success and one of the works featured, East Coast Light 1 (1973), is in the collection of the Crawford Art Gallery.

Scully emigrated to America in 1975 and established himself at the heart of the New York art world. His paintings now hang in museums and private collections all over the world including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Ulster Museum, Belfast and the Deutsche Bank Collection.

Figure/Abstract ran at the Ludwig Museum, Koblenz in 2014, and at Kunsthalle, Rostock from March – May 2015. The exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery will be its only presentation outside of Germany. Figure Abstract at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork is produced by Crawford Art Gallery with concept and curation by Marc O’Sullivan and Tina Darb.