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Lot Essay
An important exponent of abstract art of the Post-War era, Ellsworth Kelly created works of startling visual intensity, lyrically distilling visual experiences rooted in nature, which he transformed into pure abstraction through flat planes of color. Kelly's art has influenced some of the most significant artistic movements of the past half century, ranging from Color-Field painting and Post-painterly Abstraction to Minimalism and Hard-edge painting, while never formally belonging to any of them. Kelly has described his artistic mission thus: "I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness" (E. Kelly, quoted in Ellsworth Kelly: Recent Paintings and Sculptures, exh. cat., New York, 1979, p. 7).
Green White, painted in 1961, is a monumentally scaled canvas that superbly encapsulates Kelly's signature language of abstraction. As Kelly insisted, "In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a personal handwriting, putting marks on canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use" (E. Kelly, Notes of 1969, reprinted in K. Stiles and P. Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley, 1996, p. 93). The flat, unmodulated surfaces that Kelly favored were a dramatic riposte to the dominant American style of Abstract Expressionism, but Kelly managed to derive a visual force comparable to the most loaded bravura brushwork in his audaciously reduced forms. He frequently worked with two-color compositions, as in the present work, playing with perceptual ambiguity between positive and negative space, and heightening the expressive interaction of his forms.
The curving forms of the two-color composition of Green-White represent an important development in Kelly's oeuvre in which he moved away from rectilinear, hard-edged shapes in favor for a more organic, softer composition. Since his first forays into abstraction while living in Paris in 1949, Kelly worked with shapes derived from life, such as found objects or shadows, using these forms not as biomorphic metaphors, but as pure visual experiences in themselves. As Kelly proclaimed, "Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt" (Ibid.).
Green White, painted in 1961, is a monumentally scaled canvas that superbly encapsulates Kelly's signature language of abstraction. As Kelly insisted, "In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a personal handwriting, putting marks on canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use" (E. Kelly, Notes of 1969, reprinted in K. Stiles and P. Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley, 1996, p. 93). The flat, unmodulated surfaces that Kelly favored were a dramatic riposte to the dominant American style of Abstract Expressionism, but Kelly managed to derive a visual force comparable to the most loaded bravura brushwork in his audaciously reduced forms. He frequently worked with two-color compositions, as in the present work, playing with perceptual ambiguity between positive and negative space, and heightening the expressive interaction of his forms.
The curving forms of the two-color composition of Green-White represent an important development in Kelly's oeuvre in which he moved away from rectilinear, hard-edged shapes in favor for a more organic, softer composition. Since his first forays into abstraction while living in Paris in 1949, Kelly worked with shapes derived from life, such as found objects or shadows, using these forms not as biomorphic metaphors, but as pure visual experiences in themselves. As Kelly proclaimed, "Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt" (Ibid.).