ART CITIES: N.York-Ellsworth Kelly

Spanning seven decades, Ellsworth Kelly’s career is marked by the independent route his art has taken from any formal school or art movement, and by his innovative contribution to twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Kelly draws on the connection between abstraction and nature from which he extrapolates forms and colors. Since the beginning of his career, Kelly’s emphasis on pure form and color, and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of creating spatial unity have played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America.

By Efi Michaparou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

Over the course of his Ellsworth Kelly helped reshape abstract art. In addition to his shaped canvases, multi-panel paintings, and large-scale sculptures, Kelly developed a distinct palette to which he would return over many years. Featuring six large-scale paintings and sculptures installed across two spaces of Matthew Marks Gallery the exhibition “Blue Green Black Red” focuses on works made in these four colors that Kelly used both separately and in different combinations across various media throughout his career. Ellsworth Kelly articulated his desire to make architecturally scaled works as early as 1950 in a letter to John Cage: “My collages are only ideas for things much larger — things to cover walls. In fact, all the things I’ve done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long— to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures — they should be the wall”. Kelly created his first floor painting in 1990 in response to curator Kasper König’s invitation to exhibit at Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany. Yellow Curve (1990) filled the floor of the exhibition space, spanning two adjacent walls. Over the next twenty years, Kelly made four more floor paintings including two in black, one in blue, and this one in red. Installed on the floor and measuring over 610 x 1220 cm, “Red Floor Panel” (1992) is the culmination of Kelly’s desire to extend his canvases into space. One of five floor paintings Kelly made, “Red Floor Panel” was originally exhibited at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster, Germany and is being shown here for the first time in thirty years. “Blue Green Black Red” (1989) has the same sequence of colors and proportions as the Dallas Panels, commissioned by I.M. Pei for the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. Multi-panel works like this and the later “Blue Red Green Black” (2004) exemplify Kelly’s desire to integrate his paintings with their surroundings; to utilize the walls themselves as part of the work. For more than fifty years, Ellsworth Kelly has worked to refine elements of the observed world into rigorous abstraction with a bold clarity and elegance.  “My work has always been about vision, the process of seeing,” he notes. “Each work of art is a fragment of a larger context… . I’ve always been interested in things that I see that don’t make sense out of context, that lead you into something else”. Maintaining a persistent focus on the dynamic relationships between shape, form and color, Kelly challenges viewers’ conceptions of space. He intends for viewers to experience his artwork with instinctive, physical responses to the work’s structure, color, and surrounding space, rather than with contextual or interpretive analysis.  His flat, immaculate compositions of pure line, simple forms, and saturated, unmodulated color are, in essence, found images, distillations of architectural details, shadows, plants, and other subtle forms that often might be overlooked. The contour of a leaf, the arch of a bridge and its reflection in water, and the soft curve of a hillside seen from the road have inspired paintings, sculptures, and prints alike.  His art work represent a subjective interpretation of reality, rather than a descriptive copy of it. Kelly’s arrangement of the complementary colors, which work to intensify one another at their intersections, is also an essential component of the work.  Ordinary memories such as these, Kelly has said, prompt many of his works. ”As we move, looking at hundreds of different things, we see many different kinds of shapes. Roofs, walls, ceilings are all rectangles, but we don’t see them that way. In reality they’re very elusive forms. The way the view through the rungs of a chair changes when you move even the slightest bit – I want to capture some of that mystery in my work”.

Photo: Ellsworth Kelly, Red Floor Panel, 1992, Acrylic on canvas on wood, 1 × 316½ × 478¾ inches; 3 × 804 × 1216 cm, © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Matthew Marks Gallery

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street and 523 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 6/5-25/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/