Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings May/June New York City
Saturday, June 24, 2017 at 05:30 PM
About American Abstract Expressionist Ellsworth Kelly
In a career spanning almost seventy years, Ellsworth Kelly redefined abstraction in art, evading critical attempts to classify him as a Color Field, hard-edge, or Minimalist painter. Beginning in the late 1940s, he established himself through his drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints as one of the most important artists of his era. His visual vocabulary was drawn from observation of the world around him — shapes and colors found in plants, architecture, shadows — and has been shaped by his interest in the spaces between places and objects, and between his work and its viewers: "In my work I don't want you to look at the surface; I want you to look at the form, the relationships."
Kelly (1923-2015) has been the subject of major exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and his work is in many public collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Tate Modern, London.