447 SPACE

One of the remits of the 447 Space, as it is set up by the artists Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko, is to provide an occasional exhibition space in the heart of Chelsea to fellow artists and friends who need a place to show their work. This continues a long-standing tradition in which Sean has over the years offered part of his studio space to artists in need of a platform.

The magnificent Chelsea space was converted into a studio by Sean Scully in 1999 and served as the primary working studio space for Sean and his wife Liliane from 1999 until 2014, at which point they moved to live upstate with their young son, and set up a new studio in Tappan, New York.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945, and later moved to a working-class part of South London, becoming an apprentice commercial typesetter at age 15. At 20, he started full-time at Croydon College of Art, London, before moving to Newcastle University in 1968. In 1970 Sean Scully won the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation prize, and in 1972 a runner-up prize in the 1972 John Moores Painting Prize, and 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. Scully’s work is in the collection of nearly every major museum around the world. In 2014, he became the only Western artist to have had a career-length retrospective exhibition in China. In 2018 he was awarded the International Artist of the Year Prize in Hong Kong. Recent solo exhibitions include Landline at the Hirshhorn and Wadsworth Atheneum, USA, Vita Duplex at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, and LWL-Museum for Art and Culture, Münster; Sea Star at The National Gallery, London; HUMAN at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice for the 58th Venice Art Biennale, Passenger, a rest Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, MUDEC, Milan, and a major retrospective The Shape of Ideas organized by The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania and opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in 2021 and then Philadelphia in 2022.

Liliane Tomasko (b. 1967, Zurich) is a Swiss artist of Hungarian descent with a BA in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, 1995, and an MA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1998. Tomasko has works in public collections that include the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; Hilti Art Foundation, Schaan, Lichenstein; IVAM-Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, Valencia, Spain; the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany; Lowe Art Museum, Miami, USA; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Richmond, Virginia, USA, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Chateau La Coste, France in 2019, Morpheus at the Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany in 2021, and 2022 sees two important solo exhibitions: Evening Wind at the Edward Hopper Museum & Study Center in Nyack NY, and Spell of the Woods at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland. A large solo exhibition of new work will be held at CAB Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Burgos, Sain in 2023.