ART CITIES:N.York-Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, is one of America’s great 20th Century Abstract artists, who in the years after WWII shaped a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European Abstraction with forms distilled from everyday life. Maintaining a persistent focus on the dynamic relationships between shape, form and color, Kelly was one of the first artists to create irregularly shaped canvases.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Two solo exhibitions complementing each other with works by Ellsworth Kelly are on presentation at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. The 10 canvases in “Ellsworth Kelly – Last Paintings”, made in the months leading up to Kelly’s death on 25/12/2015 in New York, are the culmination of his 70-years pursuit of a singular artistic vision. As John Coplans wrote, “Kelly is quite likely to delve into any part of his repertoire and at any time add variations that may have been conceived months or years previously”. This practice continued until the end of Kelly’s life, and several of his last paintings are either variations of earlier works or based on studies he made before. A new diptych revisits a single-panel 1963 painting, eliminating the background and allowing the shapes to float free on the wall. A three-panel painting is a variation of “Study for Four Color Panels” (1954). In the new work Kelly has removed the white panel and, in a similar way to the diptych, allowed the white of the wall to complete the composition. Alongside his paintings, Kelly is famous for his beautiful drawings of plants, flowers, and leaves, which were shown together with Matisse’s plant drawings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002. The exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly – Plant Drawings” includes 25 drawings spanning nearly 60 years, the majority of which are exhibited here for the first time. Since the late ‘40s Kelly’s drawings of nature have played a central role in his art, as Kelly wrote “The drawings from plant life seem to be the bridge to the way of seeing that brought about the paintings in 1949 that are the basis for all my later work. They are exact observations of the form of the leaf or flower or fruit seen. Nothing is changed or added”. The drawings express an enthusiasm for found compositions that is unique to Kelly’s work. He made each drawing from life, sometimes barely lifting the pencil as he translated the plant’s contours to paper. Despite the immediacy of their execution, the drawings share a great deal with his paintings and sculptures, not only in their focus on direct visual impressions but also in their fascination with the effects of negative space and overlapping planes.
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street and 526 West 22nd Street, Duration 5/5-24/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.matthewmarks.com
