Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and grew up in London. One of the leading contemporary artists, he contends that art results from the conflict between body and soul, impulse and reflection, structure and emotion, superficiality and depth.
Vita Duplex, the exhibition staged at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, shows some one hundred works by the artist and offers a comprehensive overview of his oeuvre and his mental universe. Scully’s passionate abstract paintings perfectly reflect his poetical and philosophical approach to such subjects as metaphysics, melancholia, passion, human nature, the sorrow caused by loss, or our ability to perceive tensions, resist and overcome them and finally reconcile after conflicts.