Sean Scully

Lisson is pleased to present acclaimed artist Sean Scully’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai since his landmark survey in 2014, Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964–2014, at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum—which marked him as the first Western artist to receive a career-spanning retrospective in China. Scully returns with new works from his celebrated Landline series, where broad horizontal stripes evoke the natural horizon. This presentation follows recent institutional exhibitions in China, including Away From The Sea at He Art Museum, Shunde (2024), and Sublime and Sunyata at the Art Museum of Sichuan Conservatory of Music (2025).

Sean Scully’s Landline works are largely inspired by his years in Ireland, particularly his time looking out to the sea. The architectural qualities of landscapes unfold to reveal the physical and emotional dimensions of experience and memory. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of colour, the Landline paintings show Scully’s transition away from his earlier hard-edged minimalism to a more expressive style that elicits the beauty and brilliance of the natural world, which at once bring to the colour fields of classic European paintings, and a more organic approach to the stripes. With gestures evoking the land, sea, and sky, as well as the indistinct lines between them, the works navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of these interactions.