Born in Dublin in 1945, Scully was inspired by paintings he saw in a local church and decided at a young age to become a painter. After studies in England and at Harvard University in the United States of America during the 1960s and early 1970s, Scully moved to New York in 1975, and has since held major exhibitions in museums throughout North America and Europe.

Drawing on the great tradition of the Abstract Expressionists, Scully’s art is both physically and visually compelling, as well as meditative. His paintings are immensely physical. They often extend over 3 metres in length, and are made with thick, heavy stretchers that project into the space of the viewer. Scully’s work is deeply concerned with colour, light and beauty, and looks to engage its viewer in a reflection on the meaning of presence and being. The paintings are intended to remind the viewer of, in the artist’s terms, ‘the brutality of reality’ and of the ‘fact that we are physical…my paintings begin with that premise’. This is, in the most profound way, a humanist experience, enabled at a time when the terms of ‘humanism’ seem disturbingly uncertain.

Scully’s abstract paintings are thus firmly rooted in the real world. His austere, geometrical forms often reference those spaces in which a majority of the world’s populations now live: the real world of the city—its architecture, landscapes, signs, roads. As the artist has suggested: ‘What I’m trying to do is something about modern life…I want to express that we live in a world with repetitive rhythms and that things are existing side by side that seem incongruous or difficult. Yet, out of that, is our truth. It expresses where we are’.