The American artist Ellsworth Kelly is much admired in Britain but very rarely seen. This exhibition at Tate St. Ives in Cornwall, brings together two special loans, alongside a number of paintings from the Tate Collection, to create an installation in the curved, sea-facing gallery relating to the architectural dynamic in Kelly's work.
 
A select group of "Plant Lithographs" from the Grand Rapids Museum's touring exhibition, showing Kelly's fascination with form in nature, will also be included at the show, which runs from Jan. 28 to May 7.

Since the late 1940s, Kelly has explored the power of abstract form through meticulous geometry to create paintings and sculptures which reveal an extraordinary poetic vision, the museum says.
 
According to the Tate, Kelly's skill in working with form, colour, space and line to create monumental visual statements is a result of his acute spatial sensibility and an understanding of the potential in the fusion of these elements. Kelly treats color as an independent element in which representation no longer plays a role, but the color itself becomes form and utilizes the architectural plane on which it sits and the space around it. Kelly is interested in the elusiveness of forms that we glimpse as part of our lives and manipulating such forms to create new illusions of space and colour.

Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, Kelly lives and works in Spencertown, N.Y. While living in Paris, he visited the studios of artists Brancusi, Vantongerloo and Arp, and, in 1949, he turned from paintings of the human figure influenced by Picasso and Klee to abstract art. He began to create pictures abstracted from fragments of the seen world, such as windows, plant forms and shadows falling onto a flight of steps, along with composite works assembled from a number of panels, each painted a single, uniform colour. His first one-man exhibition opened at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951.
 
In 1954, Kelly returned to New York and began to make paintings in black and white, or one color and white, with semi-organic shapes, and was awarded one of four equal main prizes for painting at the 1964 Pittsburgh International. From the mid-1960s, he began to use opposing color areas and a modular structure. His sculptures, sometimes in relief, sometimes free-standing, consist of painted cut-out metal shapes that relate to the shapes in the paintings.




Images Courtesy of Tate St Ives, © Ellsworth Kelly