Painted at a pinnacle moment in his career following his initial visit to the United States in 1972 on a fellowship at Harvard University awarded by Frank Knox, and his first solo exhibition at London's Rowan Gallery in 1973, First Series No. 2/4 highlights the influence this stint in America had on Scully, an experience which would encourage him to return to New York in 1975 with the aid of the Harkness Fellowship for a period of two years. After the fellowship, Scully took the leap and emigrated to New York, ingratiating himself in the city's thriving minimalist art scene, expressing that 'his American experience made the London situation seem provincial and limiting'. First Series No. 2/4 was exhibited the same year in his first US exhibition, Sean Scully Paintings 1974 at La Tortue Galerie in Santa Monica, California, a prominent gallery at the time, with paintings from this sell-out exhibition encompassing the characteristics that would come to be known as the artist's trademark in the subsequent years of his career.

A key work painted at the height of his rising notoriety, First Series No. 2/4 charts the evolving nature of his painting style, from ultra-refined, geometric abstraction, shifting towards a more expressive use of material; still within a set structure but more akin to ordered chaos, with interlocking lines bleeding out of their parameter, to which he says of this dichotomy, "My painting has order; the stripes are tied up horizontally in order, yet they are painted rough. So they, in a sense, carry the possibility to overwhelm their own order. The painting is full of subversive elements that the stripes are obliged to transverse in order to maintain their allusion to classical pictorial order."