Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly la combe II 1950-51

Since the beginning of his artistic endeavours, Ellsworth Kelly dealt with basic shapes he found in reality. In so doing, his perception is inspired by an object’s external characteristics. He is interested in shadows and the texture of surfaces isolated from their contexts. By transforming his pictorial ideas into black and white – as a representation of dark and light – Ellsworth Kelly is able to concentrate exclusively on form and outline. The distraction of emotional values of colours is omitted. Ellsworth Kelly’s use of these forms revolves around one central topic: How significantly does the perception of mass and volume, of figure and ground, of the canvas and its relation to space alternate, depending on whether black appears over white or white cuts through black. Ellsworth Kelly usually reduces an object that captivates his attention into the two-dimensional: a glass porch, the floor of a terrace in an Parisian sidewalk cafe, the shadow of a hand rail on a staircase. His gaze penetrates these objects, i.e. he reaches to their very nature by removing them from their spatial context. Ellsworth Kelly isolates and copies without modifying or adding anything. He deliberately does not resort to invented lines and is thereby free of any necessity to compose something: “The things that interest me were always there.”

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