Black Panel II - Ellsworth Kelly, 1985
From the Museum of Fine Arts Boston:
A student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1946-48, Ellsworth Kelley has gone on to be one of the most significant proponents of non-representational art in the Post-War period. Black Panel II belongs to a series of shaped monochrome canvasses that the artist sees as the fulfillment of three decades of work. At first sight, the work’s shape and darkness seem aggressively bold, though with prolonged viewing from a variety of angles, the piece acquires great ambiguity, even fragility. The shape proves to be subtle, evoking different readings and imagined perspective, while the black comes to life, appearing either darker or lighter.
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Red Panel - Ellsworth Kelly, 1980
From the Dallas Museum of Art:
At first glance, Red Panel seems simple-a large red square. In fact, however, the corners are not each 90 degrees. As a result, the work seems to be pulled in two directions. It bends out and is intended to float on the wall as a fusion of sculpture and painting. Viewers are invited to experience the pleasure of a pure red form, strong and direct, elegant, dynamic, as if a force is acting upon it, giving it energy. Kelly’s shapes are based on his observation of the world around him. “I try to see the corner of a table as it would look to me before my brain telegraphs the message "table” … as a shape [rather than] part of a table.“
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Color Panels For A Large Wall - Ellsworth Kelly, 1978. Located in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
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Blue Green Yellow Orange Red - Ellsworth Kelly, 1966
From the Guggenheim:
Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red exemplifies Kelly’s lucid, forthright style. Five monochrome panels are arranged in the order of the chromatic spectrum, the primary colors balanced by their intermediary values of green and orange. The concentrated colors are charged by their interaction with each other, and the work’s size—monumental, yet at a human scale by virtue of its breakdown into vertical panels—further strengthens its presence.
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Blue Green Red - Ellsworth Kelly, 1963
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Hard-edged, flat, and without a trace of the artist’s hand, Kelly’s signature imagery is nonetheless based on architectural and natural forms. In Kelly’s hands, abstraction becomes a conceptual method by which he reconfigures and recontextualizes the forms and structures of the real world. His paintings and sculptures represent a subjective interpretation of reality, rather than a descriptive copy of it. In “Blue Green Red,” he has juxtaposed three bold colors in a highly skillful and effective manner to create a complex picture in which color and shape are one. The edges of one shape—the rectangle—are identified with the edges of the canvas, while the blue ellipse expands beyond the canvas, forcing us to finish it in our minds. Despite the clean, precise rendering of the ellipse, its form is irregular and seems to float and swell, activating the entire composition.
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