Painter Sean Scully stood back and admired his handiwork yesterday afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“They’re heroic,” he said. “In large paintings, the brushstroke is made by the body. So you have to relate to it with your body.”

An exhibit of his work, “Sean Scully: Wall of Light,” will open on Tuesday. In preparation, the museum began hanging paintings early this week. By yesterday afternoon, most of the large works had been hung, and an assistant was applying wall text with a blow-drier. But one of the largest works, “Wall of Light Dark Orange” (2001) — which measures 11 feet long and 9 feet tall and is part of the Met’s permanent collection — still leaned against a wall. Four people, two on ladders and two crouching to support the painting’s weight, struggled to settle it in its mount. After several tries, it locked into its place, and Mr. Scully applauded. A supervising technician for the museum, Cynthia Iavaroni, sighed with relief. “We’re never taking it off the wall!”

“Wall of Light” was organized by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and was first presented there last October. The exhibit then traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and now to the Met. The curator of the Phillips Collection, Stephen Bennett Phillips, was on hand in New York, pacing the rooms. Mr. Phillips edited the exhibition catalogue and contributed two essays to it.

The exhibit consists of 60 works that are part of Mr. Scully’s “Wall of Light” series. There are about 20 large-scale oil paintings, which are hung in a gallery bright with sun from large overhead skylights. Smaller rooms hold watercolors, aquatints, and pastels. The template for the works in the series is a grid of rectangles fitted together in horizontal and vertical groups, with varying color motifs, painted with layered colors and broad brushstrokes. “Unlike a figurative artist, who works from a specificity to a universal, mine is already a universal approach,” Mr. Scully said. “I try to bring information of the world to it, to ground it, to give it a kind of specificity.”

The specificities come in part from location: Many of the paintings include the names of places whose light inspired the color palate, including Barcelona and Chelsea; other works were inspired by the light in Munich and London. Mr. Scully described the paintings as “an abstract building continuum.”

There is another continuum at work: “The Met was the first museum to buy my work in America,” Mr. Scully said.

“It was Bill Lieberman, really a character,” he added, referring to the museum’s former chairman of the department of 20th-century art. “The Phillips Collection was the second. It’s amazing how memory of an action influences the future.” He told the story of the butterfly flapping its wings on one continent, causing a tidal wave in another, and mused on how those decades-ago sales brought the current show into existence. Though the curators that first supported him are gone now — Mr. Lieberman died last year — their institutions are still involved with his career. “Now the Phillips and the Met started and finished this show. And they both bought red paintings, and both bought my work within a few months in the 1980s.”

Mr. Scully was born in Dublin and raised in a working-class neighborhood of south London. He came to America on a fellowship at Harvard University in 1972, settling in New York a few years later.

The “Wall of Light” series has its origins in 1983, the same year he became an American citizen. Mr. Scully was in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, “taking my watercolor palate, making travel pictures, really. I was thinking about walls, about architecture, the way stone is transformed by light.”

He named one small work “Wall of Light,” in what he now calls “a pure inspirational moment.” But the series by that name needed more time to develop. “I put that watercolor away for — how many years? — 15 years, and then it became even more inspirational.” The first painting pointing to the series, “Because of the Other” (1997), began in the same vein of his other work in the mid-1990s, the rectangle motif in cream and black.

“‘Because of the Other’ started as black and white, but then I layered color on top,” he said, comparing the painting to an earlier work,”Light in August” (1991), which is also reproduced in the book that accompanies the exhibition. He was pleased with those blocks of mustard yellow and orange, the results of the color experiment. Nearly 10 years later, there are now more than 200 works in the series.

“I had no idea it would be this long,” he said. “But I’m a fairly tenacious fellow, so here it is.”