Sean Scully is among the greatest abstract painters of our age. He is also one of the most outspoken. Since the late 1960s, Scully’s visual expressiveness has been matched by a verbal dynamism that is no less arresting than his art. Varying widely in form from brief reflections of compressed eloquence to essay-long meditations on artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Giorgio Morandi and Mark Rothko–Scully’s writings are distinguished by a brutal lyricism and the effortlessness of their aphoristic turn of phrase. At once biographical and political, poignant and unflinching, the nearly 200 texts that comprise Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully provide a unique perspective on one of the most engaging artistic imaginations of the past half century. Here, readers will discover the effusions of a mind tirelessly wrestling with the profoundest issues of art, cultural history, and what it means to be a creator in the contemporary world. The volume will be accompanied by key images illustrating Scully’s words as well as facsimile reproductions of handwritten pages by the artist into which drawings have been integrated.

Text by: Sean Scully