Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important artists of the post-war period. Kelly crucially influenced the development of Hard-Edge Painting, Colour Field, Pop Art and Minimalism. Kelly's artworks demonstrate precise methods focusing on shape, form and colour. Throughout his long career, Kelly maintained a persistent focus on these dynamic relationships. The artist's subsequent line drawings, layered reliefs and flat sculptures further challenged the viewer's conceptions of space.
Ellsworth Kelly's approach to abstraction was utterly unique. The artist would select objects seen out there in the world and present them as apparent abstractions often employing bright colours. Kelly would adopt the form of an awning or the shape of a window or the fold in a cigarette package or the contours of a leaf. This approach presented a new horizon of possibilities. His use of found compositions resulted in a language that was both personal and universal. Kelly translated these found compositions into paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs.
Kelly would rarely abandon an idea and would often return to his earlier works and sketches. This would create a system that was very open and allow embryonic themes to mature without stress or urgency. The immediacy of his sensory intuition, combined with his diligent translation of it, enabled Kelly to keep making innovative work throughout his long career. This slow gestation helps explain one of contemporary art's most consistently strong bodies of work.
Ellsworth Kelly's career spanned seven decades of continuous creativity. The innovations of the late 1940s and early 1950s helped reshape abstract art for decades to come. In the 1950s he rose to critical acclaim with his bright, multi-panelled and largely monochromatic canvases of solid colour. Kelly was one of the first artists to create irregularly shaped canvases. In the 1960s many artists wished to break away from abstract expressionism with its preoccupation of inner, ego-based psychological expression. Kelly was a major influence toward a new form of art working with broad fields of colour, the empirical observation of nature and referencing the everyday. Kelly was increasingly influential during the early 1960s and 1970s among his own artistic community which included Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. He also provided an example of abstract, scaled-down images to the Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Richard Serra.
Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York, USA. He served in the military during World War II. After the war, through the G.I. Bill, Kelly was able to study art in Boston and in 1948 he continued his studies in France. In Paris, Ellsworth Kelly encountered a wide range of classical and modern art. The artist saw Byzantine icons, Romanesque frescoes and Matisse paintings. He met Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso amongst other major artworld figures. This was transformative and helped Ellsworth Kelly develop his own artistic language.
After being well received by the Paris art community, Ellsworth Kelly returned to the United States in 1954 and joined the new wave of American painters following in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Two years later the artist settled in the downtown Coenties Slip community of artists which included Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney and Jack Youngerman. Kelly worked on a larger scale and expanded his exploration of dimensionality.
In 1956 Kelly had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1959 he was part of the Museum of Modern Art's major 'Sixteen Americans' exhibition alongside Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. In 1970 Kelly moved into the farmhouse at Spencertown, New York that would remain his primary residence for the remainder of his life. In 1973 his first retrospective was organised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Tate Gallery in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.