NEW YORK—A key painter of his generation, Sean Scully has long combined traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, creating a body of work unapologetically committed to the qualities he sees as integral to painting: the emotional, spiritual and intellectual power of drawing, as well as form, light and structure. His paintings engage the medium's unique ability to capture something of the human condition, irregardless of prevailing tastes or trends.

Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1945, and raised in South London, Scully settled in New York after studying at the Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University and after a graduate fellowship at Harvard in the early 1970s. The Wall of Light series featured at the Phillips Collection, in an exhibition opening Oct. 22 and on view until Jan. 8, is considered one of the artist's most important series to date. The exhibition will also travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the touring exhibition, Scully has several upcoming museum and gallery shows in Munich, New York, Madrid, Barcelona and Rome.

The Wall of Light series originated on a trip to Mexico you took in 1983; what about that experience has sustained the series?

The interest in the series is in a shifting sense of proportion. These paintings are not a simple grid. In other words, I come out of a drawing tradition and that means that I'm not simply counting off the grid. So the paintings may look like they're on a grid, but the grid is very much a hand-drawn one, so it becomes experiential. The idea of surface—whether the spaces between the bands, the bars and the blocks, are open, less open, more open — it's sustained in the same way that figurative painting would be sustained, or in the way landscape painting would be sustained.

These paintings are capable of feeding off various experiences—my travels, and the locations I work in. So the paintings I make in Barcelona tend to be more humid and luxurious. The paintings I make in New York tend to be more hard-headed and intellectual. … These changes in surface, changes in scale—you know I work very small and also very big—sustain the series.

What sustains your project overall? Your practice has been to unite a European modernist sensibility with a vigor that is commonly associated with American painting.

The simple answer to the question is the difficulty of it. That is what has made it enduring, because it's such a big project to take on. What I've done is I've taken American iconography—or what is associated with American iconography, that actually came from Europe—and I've tried to bring to bear on it a European sense of the pathos of history. I've added to that the graphic force of a simple way of drawing. I think the contradiction in that is what is fascinating to the people who are fascinated by it.

As an abstract painter, what do you make of what has been called the current 'return' or 'triumph' of figurative painting?

It depends on whether you see such a big difference between the two. I don't. Modernism, formalism, has collapsed, and the most interesting painting that's being made right now is European. And the interest now is not so much in what one is painting, but in the way in which it's painted. The idea of sensibility, of interpretation, has returned, and thus painting has returned.

It's not a question of new forms. It's more a question of the way things are painted, the way it was after the High Renaissance, for example. And the sense of surface, odd color and emotional complexity in my paintings, the familiarity of the imagery but the discomfort of the treatment of the imagery, has a very strong relationship with a lot of painting that's coming out of Europe, particularly Germany. I see my own trajectory as a painter more like that of Lucian Freud, than like those of other abstract painters, because my work has been consistently against the obvious moment of fashion.