Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly was an American artist known for his use of bright colours and distilled line and form. Associated with hard-edge abstraction, Minimalism and Colour Field painting, his works employed seriality and chance. They were part of a departure from Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s. Despite its rigour, however, Kelly’s art is emotive, intuitive and joyful.

Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923. After serving in the World War II, he studied art on the G.I. Bill in Boston. From 1948 to 1954, Kelly lived in Paris. He admired the Egyptian reliefs at the Louvre, and manuscripts and mosaics at the Byzantine Institute. He learnt from Jean Arp’s experiments with chance, and from Henri Matisse’s deft use of line.

In Paris, Kelly began to derive abstract paintings from fragments of his environment: a window, a shadow on a stairwell, the arch of a bridge reflected in water. ‘Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added’, he said.

While abstract, these ‘found’ motifs were grounded in the real world, rather than universal forms. Kelly would develop his unique approach in paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs for the next seven decades.

After returning to New York, Kelly settled in the downtown Coenties Slip community alongside artists including Agnes Martin and Robert Indiana. He amplified his works’ scale, colour and ambition. He began to use non-rectangular canvases, blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture and relief. In the 1970s, after moving to a spacious studio in upstate Spencertown, he introduced curved shapes. Kelly’s large, vibrant canvases are among his most sought-after works. Red Curve VII (1982) sold for almost US$10 million at Christie’s New York in 2019.

Kelly also made elegant drawings of plants from life throughout his career. Like his abstract works, they display his fascination with contour and negative space. His plant drawings were shown alongside those of Matisse at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002.

In 2015, the final year of his life, Kelly gifted his design for a building named Austin to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. It opened to the public in 2018. Inspired by the Romanesque and Byzantine art Kelly had studied in Paris, it features stained-glass windows in a rainbow of colours. This architectural legacy continues the tradition of artist commissions such as the Rothko Chapel in Houston and the Matisse Chapel in Venice.

‘Kelly’s art is directed towards viewers who trust their eyes and wish to use them’, wrote art historian Gottfried Boehm. ‘What he gives them is the experience of an extraordinary sensuous and spiritual intensity, of a euphoric affirmation and a blissful abundance: “look!”