MOSCOW, RUSSIA.- Following a series of highly successful exhibitions in China, the international acclaimed abstract artist Sean Scully will have a touring show at The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow opening on 3 November 2017, curated by Russia’s leading curator Olga Siblova. Sean Scully: Facing East, a career-spanning solo exhibition of works by the artist, will then travel to the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg from 15 February - 9 April, 2018. 

The thirty paintings, watercolours, mixed-media compositions, and pastels that are featured in the exhibition chronicle the artist’s rise to prominence as one of the most significant painters of his era. His name, the legendary art critic and cultural philosopher Arthur Danto insisted, “belongs on the shortest of short lists of the major painters of our time.” To move chronologically in the exhibition from work to work—from the sole figurative study in the show, undertaken in 1967, to the spare music of one of Scully’s more recent “Landlines”, created half a century later—is to witness the gradual development of a visual vocabulary that is as distinctive as any in art history. Scully’s deceptively simple schemes of latitudinal and longitudinal stripes, refined over a period of fifty years, are remarkable for their ability to transcend a bold materiality of texture and tone to become, instead, the felt coordinates of an inner landscape: lines of vision. 

A catalogue for the exhibition, with texts by Kelly Grovier and Olga Siblova and a foreward by Eugenia Petrova, will be published by the State Russian Museum for both venues.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and was brought up in London and immigrated to the States in 1975. He currently lives and works in New York and also has a studio outside Munich. He studied painting at the Croydon College of Art (London) and Newcastle University (England), received a graduate Fellowship at Harvard University in 1973, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, and Honorary Degrees, Doctorate of Fine Arts from The Massachusetts College of Art (Boston) and the National University of Ireland (Dublin). He has been the Turner Prize nominee at Tate London twice, in 1989 and 1993.