PROVENANCE Judith Anderson Collection Purchased from Timothy Taylor, London

WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF GALLERIST JUDITH ANDERSON LOTS 1 - 8

Sean Scully is an American-Irish artist internationally recognised for his distinctive abstract compositions that interrogate the properties of light, colour and form.

Scully studied painting at Croydon College of Art, London and Newcastle University, where he began to work in abstraction. During a trip to Morocco in 1969, he was strongly influenced by the local textiles and rich colours of the region which he translated into the broad, horizontal stripes and deep earth tones that characterise his mature style. Scully's travels throughout Morocco and Mexico would also prompt his decision to move from minimalism to a more emotional form of abstraction. Following fellowships in 1972 and 1975 at Harvard University, Scully's paintings became increasingly monumental and sculptural, consisting of interconnected three- dimensional panels that anticipated his later sculpture practice.

In 1984 he began to develop the Wall of Light series, replacing the precise stripes of his early paintings with solid blocks of colour, built with increasingly loose and feathered brushstrokes into vertical and horizontal 'bricks' that suggest a wall of stone. Subtle differences in colour in the paintings indicate the location in which they were created, the changing seasons and the artist's own emotions. This series formed the subject of a major touring exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2007.

In 1984 Scully achieved an international breakthrough with his inclusion in the major group exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1985, several major American museums began to acquire the artist's paintings and he received his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In recent years Scully has turned to sculpture, working in steel and stone to create colossal structures that engage with the unique energy and history of their location. As in his paintings, Scully's sculptures feature individual rectangular sections that slot together, maintaining his ongoing interest in interlocking brick forms.

Scully has received numerous awards for his work, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984). He was elected a Royal Academician in 2013 and has twice been shortlisted for the Turner Prize, firstly in 1989 and again in 1993. A major retrospective toured multiple venues in China between 2015 - 2017.