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拍品专文
Ellsworth Kelly’s Thirteen Drawings reside within a crucial sector of the artist’s oeuvre and betray all notions of a simplistic rendering of plant life. In 1949, the artist painted Plant I and Plant II, placing vegetal motifs on a white and black background. He later recounted that his plant drawings built “a bridge to the way of seeing from which the 1949 paintings emerged, the point of departure for all of my later work”(E. Kelly, quoted in M. Semff , Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings, Munich, 2011, p. 8). Kelly’s persistent engagements with color, shape, and form cemented his status as a key figure within the Hard-edge painting and Minimalism movements. However, it was his earliest line drawings of vegetation that allowed him to initiate and continually explore various modes of reducing such elements to their purest manifestations.
Following the creation of Plant I and Plant II, the vegetal form was never directly translated into his paintings again, but flora continued to populate his drawings for the duration of his life. In Thirteen Drawings, Kelly depicts three dangling leaves, imbuing each interpretation with a diverse energy that speaks to his observational acuity. The pencil drawings are deceptively simplistic, with each representing a varied and fleeting moment in time. He chooses not to employ color, making the delicate, yet somewhat angular form of each leaf and stem the focal point of each work. In the centenary of Kelly’s birth, the importance of his lifelong fascination with the vegetal form cannot be understated within the generation of his artistic practice. The line serves as a demarcation of negative and positive space, mirroring many of the qualities of his color saturated monochromatic paintings. His ability to pare down his subjects so systematically is precisely what makes his contributions to abstract painting and contemporary art completely indispensable. As Ellsworth Kelly reduces facets of his work to their simplest forms, one is encouraged to consider how this choice amplifies the components that remain.
Following the creation of Plant I and Plant II, the vegetal form was never directly translated into his paintings again, but flora continued to populate his drawings for the duration of his life. In Thirteen Drawings, Kelly depicts three dangling leaves, imbuing each interpretation with a diverse energy that speaks to his observational acuity. The pencil drawings are deceptively simplistic, with each representing a varied and fleeting moment in time. He chooses not to employ color, making the delicate, yet somewhat angular form of each leaf and stem the focal point of each work. In the centenary of Kelly’s birth, the importance of his lifelong fascination with the vegetal form cannot be understated within the generation of his artistic practice. The line serves as a demarcation of negative and positive space, mirroring many of the qualities of his color saturated monochromatic paintings. His ability to pare down his subjects so systematically is precisely what makes his contributions to abstract painting and contemporary art completely indispensable. As Ellsworth Kelly reduces facets of his work to their simplest forms, one is encouraged to consider how this choice amplifies the components that remain.