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Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923)

Ellsworth Kelly was born on May 31, 1923 in Newburgh, New York. Throughout his career, he crossed the traditional boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. With clarity of vision and a sense of optimism, Kelly utilized abstraction to create a broad and diverse body of work that combines and expands the issues of form, ground, color and space.

Kelly began his studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1941 to 1943. After serving military duty from 1942 to 1945, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1946 to 1947. Kelly then left the U.S. to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he discovered Romanesque art and architecture, Byzantine art, Surrealism, and Neo-Plasticism. The automatic drawing of the surrealists led Kelly to experiment with the element of chance; Kelly was introduced to Jean Arp, and during this period he created shaped wood reliefs as well as collages incorporating this influence.

From 1950 to 1951, Kelly taught at the American School in Paris. His work consisted of an abstraction of forms observed in the real world, and he soon developed a style of geometric abstraction using bright, primary colors. This style expanded and Kelly began to create works made up of multiple separate panels that recombined to produce many alternate compositions. During this time the artist met Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia, Alexander Calder and Georges Vantonqerloo. His first solo show took place at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951.

Returning to the U.S. in 1954, Kelly took residence at Coenties slip in lower Manhattan where he met James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney and Jack Youngerman. During a span of ten years, his rounded, organic forms became sharp rectangles and his originally gestural style gained clarity with a more architectural approach. The artist then created wall-mounted installations consisting of multiple monochrome panels that could be seen both as sculptures and as paintings. In 1956, Kelly had his first New York solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1958 he moved on to create freestanding sculptures, and was included in the Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

During the seventies, Kelly created a series of totemic sculptures executed in steel and aluminum, and eventually freed himself from his characteristically severe, closed planes, exchanging them for open-ended, infinite forms. He executed several public commissions, including a mural for UNESCO in Paris, 1969, a sculpture for the city of Barcelona in 1978, Houston Triptych, a bronze sculpture for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, 1986, and a memorial for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., 1993. He had his first Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1973, and has been included in various retrospectives since, including a career retrospective in 1996 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Today, Ellsworth Kelly lives in Spencertown, New York.

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