Line and Color: The Nature of Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly is considered one of the progenitors of modernism because of his concise use of color, form and line. His vision of abstraction was not one that easily aligned with other twentieth-century artists’ interpretations. Subject matter came from his daily life and was flattened into renderings of the world around him—from the outline of a window frame to shapes that occur in nature. While many of his contemporaries were conjuring representations of their emotions, Kelly was distilling the world around him.

Line and Color: The Nature of Ellsworth Kelly illustrates how the artist drew inspiration from nature and translated that into his own form of abstraction as exemplified by two large-scale paintings and two lithographic suites from the museum’s collection.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.