Ellsworth Kelly is arguably unmatched in his spare yet vibrant language, instantly recognizable in any medium. This viewing room focuses on his prints which, as Richard H. Axsom argues in the catalogue raisonné, perhaps encapsulate Kelly’s goals and aesthetic even more so than his paintings and sculptures: the prints, with no distraction in the guise of a backing or three-dimensionality, epitomize Kelly’s trademark simplified emphasis on shape, color, surface, and ground as well as his interest in pristine surfaces and the importance of negative space.

After serving in WWII in the camouflage unit, an experience which undoubtedly inflected him artistically, Kelly honed his abstract formalist aesthetic in Paris from 1948-1954, abandoning his earlier forays into figuration. While he sporadically attended classes at the École des Beaux Arts, his real artistic education was constituted through firsthand exposure to the art of Henri Matisse, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, and Constantin Brancusi. Matisse’s use of color and Brancusi’s use of form in particular had a great impact on the artist. While Kelly’s formalist works are often compared to minimalism and hard-edged geometric abstraction, his artistic project occupies a unique place in relation to these movements both because it came before them and because his inspiration always began from forms found in nature.

Alongside many of his contemporaries, Kelly began to explore printmaking during the mid-60s. Any discussion of his prints is remiss without mentioning the importance of his collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. Gemini was Kelly’s workshop of choice as a result of their adventurous yet determined ethos, resulting in many technological innovations in order to create prints suited to Kelly’s unique specifications. As is evident in the works included in this viewing room, Kelly was very exacting and particular when it came to choosing and mixing color. When proofing one print entitled Black Brown, it ultimately took three printers five days and multiple gallons of ink to create the perfect shade of brown for the artist. Kelly also went above and beyond when it came to printing more monumentally sized works. In the late 1980s, while working on the extended Purple Red Gray Orange lithographic series, Kelly decided he wanted to create a print that was 225 inches long. As the press bed was a comparatively mere 102 inches, Kelly and the printers came up with the solution to create 4 separate prints of each of the shapes and subsequently combine them; this print was one of the largest fine art lithographs ever made. This lithograph has no counterpart in paintings, revelatory of Kelly’s delight in the medium in and of itself.

This viewing room, organized in close collaboration with Gemini G.E.L., is largely concerned with Kelly’s later prints while simultaneously providing a cohesive perspective into the key aspects of his practice. While Color Panels, Color Square I, and Dartmouth reveal Kelly’s delight in chance through the playful arrangement of colors, Red Curve and Blue Curve are expressive of the careful choice of color and love of shape that undermines his oeuvre. River II is a most interesting and unique print. As art critic Dave Hickey points out in an essay accompanying an exhibition of the Rivers series at Gemini, all of the prints belonging to this series are illustrative of Kelly’s interests across media throughout his artistic career in that they feature large scale as in his paintings, a sense of texture as in his weathered-steel and wooden sculptures, collage as in his early years, chance through their random combination of patterns, and, lastly, the prominent relation to nature that holds together his entire artistic output. This viewing room thus acts as an ode to Kelly and Gemini G.E.L. and the collaborations that led to these enduring works of art.