The fourth in a series of five annual lectures inspired by T. S. Eliot’s impact on modern literature, will be given by Sean Scully RA at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on Sunday 17th November.

The lecture, Belief versus Disbelief, will be followed by an interview led by Adrian Dunbar. Dr. Barbara Dawson, Director of The Hugh Lane Gallery, will introduce Scully and Bríd Brennan will also perform T. S. Eliot’s work.

More information and tickets here.

Sean Scully

Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1945. Four years later, his family moved to a working-class part of South London. Following various jobs as a typesetter’s apprentice, in construction, and as messenger, in 1965 at the age of 20, Scully began to study full-time at Croydon College of Art, London, before moving on to Newcastle University in 1968. In 1970, Scully won the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation prize; he received prizes in the 1972 and 1974 John Moores Painting Prize; and was awarded the Frank Knox Fellowship to attend Harvard University. In 1975, at the age of 30, Scully was awarded a two-year Harkness Fellowship with which he moved to New York.

Today, Scully lives and works between New York, Bavaria and London. He has been twice shortlisted for the Turner Prize and his work is in the collection of virtually every major museum around the world. In 2014, he became the only Western artist to have had a career-length retrospective exhibition in China (Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 – 2014 included over 100 paintings and traveled from Shanghai to Beijing). In 2018, Scully was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Newcastle University in the UK. Current solo exhibitions include Sea Star at the National Gallery  London; the retrospective titled Vita Duplex at the LWL-Museum for Art and Culture, Münster; and the first major exhibition of the figurative series inspired by his son titled, Eleuthera, at the Albertina, Vienna. Also, on view for the 58th Venice Biennale is Sean Scully: Human at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, an exhibition of recent paintings and a soaring new sculpture titled Opulent Ascension rising up under the dome of the High Renaissance church by Palladio.