Sean Scully's abstract paintings are world-famous. In them he moves far beyond a purely formal confrontation with color, form, plane, and light by also incorporating his attitudes to-ward art, society, ethics, and metaphysics. To date, however, little attention has been paid to the fact that he also creates sculptures. For these, Scully layers elements made of steel, stone, bronze, and painted aluminum on top of each other, creating horizontal structures that expand upward, yet are also linked to the stripes in his paintings. This monograph is now the first to compile Scully's important sculptures in a sin-gle volume. Besides numerous pictures, it also contains exten-sive essays about his work.

"A succinct account of the life and art of Sean Scully, widely considered to be one of the leading abstract painters of our time. This work sets his entire output within a detailed biographical framework, closely examining the relationship between the artist's paintings and his lesser-known drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints-areas of Scully's production that are rarely considered together"--

Sean Scully is among the greatest abstract painters of our age. He is also one of the most outspoken. Since the late 1960s, Scully's visual expressiveness has been matched by a verbal dynamism that is no less arresting than his art. Varying widely in form from brief reflections of compressed eloquence to essay-long meditations on artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Giorgio Morandi and Mark Rothko, Scully's writings are distinguished by a brutal lyricism and the effortlessness of their aphoristic turn of phrase. At once biographical and political, poignant and unflinching, the nearly 200 texts that comprise Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully provide a unique perspective on one of the most engaging artistic imaginations of the past half century. Here, readers will discover the effusions of a mind tirelessly wrestling with the profoundest issues of art, cultural history, and what it means to be a creator in the contemporary world. The volume will be accompanied by key images illustrating Scully's words as well as facsimile reproductions of handwritten pages by the artist into which drawings have been integrated.

"An exhibition catalog for Sean Scully's Landline"--

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Sean Scully has gained international prominence as one of the most admired contemporary abstract painters today. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, Scully's great achievement is the reinvigoration of abstract painting with the metaphorical, the philosophical and the sublime combined with the earthy tangibility of paint. From his precisely gridded works of the 1970s to the three-dimensional panels of the 1980s and his now celebrated Wall of Light paintings from the 1990s, this volume gathers the entire oeuvre of the artist, whose work is held in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; and the Tate, London. Elected a Royal Academician in 2013, Scully has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice, in 1989 and in 1993. He lives and works in New York, Barcelona, and Munich.

The acclaimed Irish American abstractionist discusses his artistic influences and philosophy with a leading aesthetic thinker In this volume, Irish American painter Sean Scully (born 1945) meets with American philosopher and art critic David Carrier for a series of in-depth interviews on the nature of art and the artist's relationship to his own work. An early job loading trucks at a cardboard factory inspired the stacked rectangle symbolism that would become the hallmark of his career; travels to Venice also greatly influenced his use of textured brushstrokes to evoke movement and flow even within carefully structured geometric patterns. Carrier probes these central elements of Scully's art along with many more questions about art history and Scully's own position within it. The assembling of such personal insights results in a book that functions as both a collection of compelling dialogues and an autobiography of Scully. Readers are able to discover Scully's art anew through his answers to Carrier's incisive questions.