Ellsworth Kelly made his first collage, Seaweed/Mandorla, in 1945 and the mode would continue to be an important, if lesser known, component of his practice for decades to follow. "Throughout his career, Kelly used collage to work through ideas about painting and sculpture, Ric Kasini Kadour wrote in Kolaj magazine. “Collage afforded him an immediate way to see an idea executed in a space...Where his painting and sculpture, with their hard edges and single color, can sometimes come off as cold and impersonal, Kelly’s collages feel deeply personal.” Alluding to the significance of collage, Kelly himself commented, “I have work to free shape from its ground and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that with color and tonality the shape finds itself in its own space and always demand its freedom and separateness.”
I just want to make works that mean something. And I don’t know where it comes from or what it means all the time. How can you know what abstraction means? So much abstraction that I see doesn’t have any meaning. It looks like design, a set-up. I want something that continues over time.
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly 1923–2015
American minimalist painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly rendered his surroundings into abstract, essential shapes and varying planes of color and empty space. After studying at the Pratt Institute in New York, he was deployed to France during World War II, where his fascination with Paris and European artists was first sparked. While in France, Kelly surrounded himself with like-minded artists including Alexander Calder and began to develop his iconic style through paintings and collages “that were arranged according to the laws of chance.” In 1954, he returned to the U.S. and gained immediate success at New York gallery shows where he exhibited his geometric, minimalist paintings and totemic sculptures. Kelly earned his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1973, and has since been the subject of retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Tate Modern in London.
Auction Results Ellsworth Kelly
