The Drawing Center presents Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals, a focused survey that comprises Sean Scully’s (b. 1945, Dublin, Ireland) acrylic, ink, graphite, and masking-tape drawings from 1974–75—presented together for the first time in over thirty years—as well as two large-scale paintings from the same period. Scully’s maturation as a painter can easily be traced back to innovations in his early drawings. These works are marked by refined geometries that re-imagine the history of abstraction as an art rooted in experience—“something felt and something seen,” as the artist has said.

Executed in London and New York City respectively, the Change and Horizontals drawings, along with their preparatory sketches and experimental typewritten drawings, highlight Scully’s core concern with line and color’s relation to place. Viewed together, the works chart an evolution of composition and gesture that provide unique insight into this artist’s singular aesthetic. This exhibition is the final stop on a transcontinental tour that included Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, UK, and traveled to Middlesbrough Institute of Art, Middlesbrough, UK; Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany; and Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome, Italy. Co-curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director, and Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.

Among numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, Sean Scully has had several major retrospectives, including those at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1989, which traveled to Palacio Velazquez, Madrid, Spain, and Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976–1995 at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., which traveled to High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, La Caixa des Pensiones, Barcelona, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; Wall of Light at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., in 2005, which traveled to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Sean Scully. A Retrospective in 2007, which traveled to Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain, Musee d’art moderne, St. Etienne, France, and MACRO al Mattatoio, Rome, Italy; and The Imagery of Sean Scully in 2009 at MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Germany, which traveled to the Ulster Museum in Belfast, UK. His most recent retrospective opened at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, and Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria in 2012.

Scully was born in 1945 in Dublin and currently lives and works in New York, Barcelona, and Mooseurach, Germany.