Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly was born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York. Spanning six decades, his career is marked by the independent route his art has taken from any formal school or art movement and by his innovative contribution to 20th century painting and sculpture. After initially studying at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts between 1946 and 1948, he left for Paris in 1949 to study at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he encountered artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miro, Alexander...See more

Ellsworth Kelly was born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York. Spanning six decades, his career is marked by the independent route his art has taken from any formal school or art movement and by his innovative contribution to 20th century painting and sculpture. After initially studying at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts between 1946 and 1948, he left for Paris in 1949 to study at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he encountered artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miro, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. In Paris drawing from his immediate surroundings Kelly formulated a strong connection between abstraction and nature with an emphasis on pure form and color. His impulse to suppress gesture in favor of creating spatial unity have played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America. Kelly's first solo exhibition took place at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951. Since then, his work has been exhibited at Documenta 6 in 1977 and the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Several solo exhibitions and retrospectives have been mounted around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973); Jeu de Paume, Paris (1993); and the Tate Gallery, London (1996). Kelly s work is held in the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2013, on the occasion of the artist s ninetieth birthday, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the MoMA in New York organized special exhibitions of Kelly s work. See less