Abstract artist Sean Scully retrospective at Barcelona’s La Pedrera

On Friday, the iconic modernist building on Barcelona’s central Passeig de Gràcia boulevard opened its doors to its latest art exhibition: a major retrospective of the abstract Irish-born and US-based artist Sean Scully.  

The exhibition features more than 60 works spanning his six-decade career. From some of his earliest figurative pieces of the 1960s to his minimalist phase of the 1970s, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, pastels, watercolors, and photographs. 

But La Pedrera will also unveil a new and “monumental piece” that is displayed in the courtyard and was made especially for the Barcelona exhibition. 

The statue “is very important because it establishes a dialogue between the works of Sean and the architecture of Gaudí,” the curator of the exhibition, Javier Molins, told the Catalan News Agency (ACN). 

Henri Matisse, Paul Klee among influences 

Born in Dublin in 1945, Sean Scully is one of the most prominent artists of contemporary abstract art.  

Over the years, Scully has reduced his iconographic repertoire to a series of lines, stripes and blocks that have become the distinctive elements of his work, which is influenced by Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and above all, Mark Rothko. 

The exhibition is open until July 6. Tickets can be purchased here.