Ellsworth Kelly: Fruits & Flowers

Ellsworth Kelly created Diagonal with Curve XII, Blue #611 for his friends, Werner Feibes and James Schmitt. In conjunction with the opening of the Feibes & Schmitt Gallery, this exhibition examines Kelly’s experimentation with curved fields of color, from tight ellipses and shapes with rounded corners to broad arcs and segments. 

Many of these geometric shapes derived from his simple line-drawn images of nature. Prints from his Plant Series will form a small companion exhibition in the Whitney-Renz Gallery.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly serves as a beautiful portfolio of the artist's plant lithographs. Accompanied by informative texts on all of these works, it also includes an insightful discussion of how they relate to the ink and pencil plant drawings that the artist has produced concurrently with the lithographs throughout his career.

An American artist of worldwide renown, Ellsworth Kelly has consistently returned to nature as a subject throughout his extraordinary career. Kelly began making prints in 1964; shortly thereafter he created his first suite of plant lithographs. To date he has produced 72 plant lithographs that fall into five major series: Suite of Plant Lithographs (1964–66); Leaves (1973–74); Twelve Leaves (1978); Series of Plant and Flower Lithographs (1983–85); Oak Leaves (1992); and several individual works. 

Kelly has occupied the center stage of modernism since his early years in Paris in the 1950s. Distinguished for his abstract style of pure color and shape, Kelly believes that his art remains rooted in the natural world. In their simplicity of line and shape, his widely admired and accessible plant lithographs provide a critical link to the character of abstraction and are a remarkable achievement within the framework of Kelly’s lifetime of accomplishment.

Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly