Artist Biennial

Ellsworth Kelly

1923–2015

58 works in the collection 32 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

Using a pared-down vocabulary and a deeply honed instinct for perceptual nuance, Ellsworth Kelly has continuously explored the tensions and balances he can cull from edge, shape, line, and color. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and, after a stint in the Army, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kelly developed his approach to abstraction while living in Paris from 1948 to 1954. His large-scale paintings and sculptures question the boundaries between the two categories. Using flat, unmodulated expanses of solid color, black, or white, Kelly explores the taut relationships that arise among space, architecture, and form within his distilled play of edges.

Kelly’s art is almost always a retranslation of what he has found by looking carefully at the world. “All my work comes from perceiving,” he has said. He painted the monumentally scaled Atlantic in New York and derived its curving, wavelike rhythm from a sketchbook in which he traced and filled in the shadows that moved across its pages while he was seated on a bus. The facing pages of the book and its central fold are mirrored in the painting’s diptych structure, although Kelly has rendered the shadows as white forms against a black ground. Perhaps the artist’s greatest mastery lies in his ability to recognize in the seemingly slight events the world presents him a potential for shifting and refining qualities of formal weights and balances into striking and powerful abstractions.

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 204.