Ellsworth Kelly Biography
Ellsworth Kelly is an American artist born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923. After studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1941 to 1943, he attended the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1946 to 1948. In 1949, he moved to Paris, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. His abstract works are based on the observation of the surrounding reality, such as the shadows of trees and the spaces between buildings.
In 1950, he met Jean (Hans) Arp and began creating collages and reliefs in shaped wood, using the law of chance to organize the elements. He also begins to paint on modular panels, which can be combined into different compositions, and on multiple panels, where each element is painted in a single color. During the 1950s, he traveled to France and met artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Alberto Magnelli, Francis Picabia and Georges Vantongerloo.
His first exhibition was organized at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris in 1951. In 1954, he returned to the United States and settled in New York, where he exhibited for the first time at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956. In 1958, he began creating sculptures without base, which rise directly from the ground.
In 1970, Kelly left town and moved to Chatham, while his home became Spencertown, New York. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized its first retrospective. In 1974, Kelly began creating sculptures on a totemic theme, using steel and aluminum. In 1977, he exhibited at Documenta in Kassel and traveled to Spain, Italy and France.
During his career, Kelly executed numerous public commissions and was the subject of numerous retrospectives, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1982 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1996, which was then presented in Los Angeles, London and Munich.
