Ellsworth Kelly
The art of Ellsworth Kelly spans the movements of abstract art, color field, minimalist, and the hard-edge school: broad crisp colors on geometric shapes with clean sharp edges. Born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York, Kelly studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After serving in the military in WWII, he continued his art studies at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and then the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first solo exhibition was in Paris in 1951. By the time he moved back to New York in 1954, Kelly's work was at the center of the art world. His paintings on large canvases with bright colors, sometimes painted on different panels that could be joined together in different patterns for one whole image, came to represent an art that was as cool as it was accessible. He was invited to create work for Brussels World's Fair 1958, Sao Paulo Biennial 1961, and Seattle World's Fair 1962, and commissions for the Transportation Building in Philadelphia, Eastman House in New York, UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, a sculpture for the city of Barcelona, and a memorial at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Painter, printmaker, and sculptor Kelly has had major exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, the Dallas Museum, the Tate in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Whitney and Guggenheim in New York, both of which have also hosted major retrospectives of his work.
