To celebrate the world renowned artist Sean Scully turning 80 this year, Kerlin Gallery has announced an exhibition of new work.
The exhibition titled Tapestry brings together four distinct bodies of work, each rooted in a deep engagement with the emotional potential of abstraction. It begins with a series of recent pencil on paper drawings, intimate in scale and delicately rendered. Alongside these are a number of handwoven tapestries, produced in collaboration with master craftsmen at Mourne Textiles, where the drawn line is translated into fibre, texture, and weight.
These are shown in conversation with new, large-scale paintings from the Stack series — shown here for the first time — these works merge drawing, painting and spray paint to create layered, muscular works that hover between architectural weight and painterly gesture. Completing the exhibition is a selection of new oil-on- copper paintings, smaller and more modest in scale but expansive in rich colour and emotional depth.
The exhibition highlights the way drawing functions as a foundational structure in Sean Scully’s work.
Drawing is not treated here as a preliminary stagebut as a generative discipline, one that underpins his
paintings, informing his use of brush and spray paint, and extends into new textile works. Just as a tapestry is built thread by thread, Scully’s practice is constructed line by line: marks accumulate, interlock, and are layered into larger forms. Whether traced in pencil, painted or woven into undyed wool, drawing persists, intimate and monumental, fragile and enduring.
Sean Scully Tapestry 28th November 2025 – 24th January 2026 Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
About the artist
Born in Dublin in 1945 Sean Scully is now recognised as one of the most influential painters of our time. Scully has exhibited extensively in leading museums worldwide over a career that spans more than five
decades. Solo exhibitions over the past two years alone include Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany (2025), Art Museum of Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Sichuan, China (2025), The Parrish Art
Museum, New York< USA (2025), Daegu Art Musem. Daegu, Korea (2025), La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain (2025), Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2024), National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2024), The He Art Museum, Shunde, China (2024) and The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2024).
Major retrospectives internationally include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2005), Musee d’art Moderne, St. Etienne, France (2008), Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2012), National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland (2015), Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil (2015), Hirshorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA (2018), De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art,
Tilburg, Netherlands (2018), Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2020), Modern Art
Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA (2021), Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (2022) and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, MAMbo, Bologna, Italy, (2022).
Scully’s work is represented in the collections of important museums around the world, including The
Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; National Gallery of Australia; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20/K21, Düsseldorf; Tate Gallery, London and in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, amongst many others.
