Sean Scully – Tapestry

To celebrate the world renowned artist Sean Scully turning 80 this year Kerlin Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work.

The exhibition titled ‘Tapestry’ brings together four distinct bodies of work, each rooted in a deep engagement with the emotional potential of abstraction. It begins with a series of recent pencil-on-paper drawings, intimate in scale and delicately rendered. Alongside these are a number of hand-woven tapestries, produced in collaboration with master craftsmen at Mourne Textiles, where the drawn line is translated into fibre, texture, and weight. These are shown in conversation with new, large-scale paintings from the Stack series — shown here for the first time — these works merge drawing, painting and spray paint to create layered, muscular works that hover between architectural weight and painterly gesture. Completing the exhibition is a selection of new oil-on-copper paintings, smaller and more modest in scale but expansive in rich colour and emotional depth.

The exhibition highlights the way drawing functions as a foundational structure in Sean Scully’s work. Drawing is not treated here as a preliminary stage but as a generative discipline, one that underpins his paintings, informing his use of brush and spray paint, and extends into new textile works. Just as a tapestry is built thread by thread, Scully’s practice is constructed line by line: marks accumulate, interlock, and are layered into larger forms. Whether traced in pencil, painted or woven into undyed wool, drawing persists, intimate and monumental, fragile and enduring.

A world-renowned abstract painter, Sean Scully is one of the leading artists of his generation. He is best known for his impactful and internationally recognisable paintings balancing dynamic bands of colour in rhythmic formulations, capturing tonality, light and mood with great drama and delicacy. His global but deeply personal perspective has seen him absorb the core elements of the visual world – from the sky and sea to the ascetic modesty of stone architectural structures – as well as the full spectrum of human pathos, from grief and pain to fatherhood. Scully’s art is highly physical, often monumental in scale and populated by vigorous, robust shape and form, and yet it is also an art of great honesty, intimacy, and even vulnerability. An abstractionist but not a formalist, Scully deploys the power of colour, depth and volume not only to give expression to the world around him, but to provide access to the spiritual domain. In recent years, the artist’s explorations of space and volume have continued into large-scale sculptural works – monumental and megalithic-feeling stone blocks that weigh down on the land, as well as airy structures in Corten steel that open up and interact with the landscape. Across these diverse approaches to making art, Scully utilises a consciously constrained system to open up an energetic multiplicity of aesthetic possibility and emotional range.

Born in Dublin and raised in London, Scully now lives between New York and Germany.