Sean Scully awarded Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Lisson is pleased to announce that this September, Sean Scully was awarded the grade of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, in recognition of his important and longstanding contribution to the arts.

The honour coincides with Scully’s participation in Cézanne et nous at the Grand Palais in Paris. Organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition explores the enduring influence of Paul Cézanne on generations of artists, bringing together more than 150 works. The show features Scully’s Dying Day (2007), placing the artist’s practice within a broader dialogue around Cézanne’s continuing impact on modern and contemporary art.

Over the course of five decades, Scully has developed a distinctive approach to abstraction that moves beyond the formal reduction of Minimalism towards a more expressive and emotionally resonant language. Best known for his large-scale paintings of vertical and horizontal bands, interlocking blocks and shifting fields of colour, his work draws on both American abstraction and European painting traditions, exploring the relationships between form, colour, spirituality and human experience.

Image: Portrait of Sean Scully, 2022. © The Artist, Courtesy Lisson. Photograph by Andrew Quinn.