Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, evading critical attempts to classify him as a Color Field, hard-edge, or Minimalist painter, has redefined abstraction in art, establishing himself through his drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints as one of the most important artists working today. Kelly’s visual vocabulary is drawn from observation of the world around him—shapes and colors found in plants, architecture, shadows on a wall or a lake—and has been shaped by his interest in the spaces between places and objects and between his work and its viewers. He has said, “In my work, I don’t want you to look at the surface; I want you to look at the form, the relationships.”

Kelly (born 1923) 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. Kelly lives and works in Spencertown, New York.