AIC: Ellsworth Kelly

White Curve..
By Ellsworth Kelly..
Year: 2009
Painted aluminium..
54 feet in length, this fan-shaped sculpture is the largest work of art Kelly has ever made.
Location: The Margot and Thomas Pritzker Garden..
Commissioned by The Art Institute of Chicago in honor of James N. Wood, President and Director, 1980–2004.









The Chicago Panels..
By Ellsworth Kelly..
Year: 1989-99..
Six painted aluminium panels..
Location: AIC Gallery: 261 / American Modern Art..
Rice Building- Second Floor..





Ellsworth Kelly Gallery
- East River, 1959
- Red Yellow Blue White and Black, 1953.. &.. [sculpture] White Disk III [1961]
Location: Modern Wing..



Ellsworth Kelly Gallery..
Train Landscape [1961], Red Yellow Blue White and Black, 1953.. &.. [sculpture] White Disk III [1961]
Location: Modern Wing..

The marker reads..
Ellsworth Kelly..
American, born 1923..
The work of Ellsworth Kelly emphasizes pure line, form and color, yet his abstraction is rooted in observed visual phenomena in natural and man made environment. Kelly explained, "Roofs, walls and ceilings are all rectangles, but we don't see them that way... The way the view through rugs of a chair changes when you move even the slightest bit - but I want to capture some of that mystery in my work. In my painting, I'm not inventing, my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look."
The works in this gallery, represent Kelly's formative years in Paris [1948-54] and his subsequent return to the United States. While in Europe, his distance from New York - and, notably, from Abstract Expressionism - freed the artist to base his compositions, inflicted by chance processes, on reductive distillations of his vision. Translating his observations into pure color, Kelly concurrently began to experiment with the possibilities of multi panel painting. His joint canvases of identically scaled monochromes - each painted to the very edge of the canvas, omitting a frame - create a single figure set against the white ground of the wall, thereby integrating each work with the gallery in which it appears. In 1954 Kelly settled in New York. Many of the works from his early years in lower Manhattan - including River East [1959] and Black and White [1960-61] - contain a particular energy, motion and scale associated with American painting of this generation, due in part to his utilization of irregular shapes. Kelly's sculptures such as White Disk III [1961] provide a complement to his paintings, exploring form in space, the base of his work, a found object, was discovered near his home and was therefore similarly informed in his surroundings...

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The Art Institute of Chicago...