Michael Scott American, b. 1958

Michael Scott  is an artist who lives and works in New York City. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received an MFA from Hunter College in 1983.

Since the mid 1980s, Michael Scott has created paintings that are visual experiences pushed to the extreme. In his paintings he has juxtaposed narrow vertical lines, at times in different colors and patterns, on aluminium panels. His artworks produce an optical impact that makes them difficult to look at and compels the viewer to see them differently each time. This disruptive experience underlines the artist’s extreme approach to visual art. In the 1990s his paintings were known to be programmatic, in the sense that they were precisely calculated and the patterns were systematic. Later, they became more intuitive, allowing chance and the process to be evident. Steering away from subjectivity, Michael Scott currently explores a systematic approach to painting which, though pure and linear in form, remains painterly.

He began exhibiting his conceptually based abstract paintings at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in the late 1980s. Since then, his work has been exhibited widely in the US, Asia and Europe, in both gallery and museum exhibitions. His paintings are included in many public collections, including Le Consortium (Dijon, France); Le FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais (Dunkerque, France); MAMCO (Geneva, Switzerland); Le Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland); Kunsthalle Bern (Bern, Switzerland); Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain, Switzerland, Musee des baux-arts, la Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, MACBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA (Los Angeles, USA).