NYAB Event - “Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety” Exhibition

“Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety” Exhibition

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St.

This event has ended.

Matthew Marks presents Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety, the next exhibition in his galleries at 502 and 522 West 22nd Street and 523 West 24th Street. Kelly celebrates his 90th birthday a few weeks after the opening of the exhibition.

The exhibition includes fourteen paintings and two sculptures made in the past two years. Kelly’s recent work continues the rigorous exploration of line, form, and color he first established nearly seven decades ago, and features new compositions as well as variations on earlier themes.

The paintings are executed in oil, built up with many layers of luminous color, including bright yellow, red, and several different blues, in addition to black and white, pale gray and subtle white-on-white works, where shadows are an integral part of the image. The paintings include both single shaped canvases, multiple canvases joined end to end, and canvases superimposed on top of one another to create a three-dimensional relief. The painted aluminum sculptures project from the wall and have reflective black or white surfaces in contrast to the matte surfaces of the paintings.

The gallery at 523 West 24th street features Curves on White (Four Panels), consisting of four individual relief paintings, which together span nearly fifty feet. Each painting is comprised of a curved panel painted a single color superimposed over a rectangular white canvas, whose “interplay of differences and similarities weaves a work of powerful internal unity,” writes Jean-Pierre Criqui in his catalogue essay. Gold with Orange Reliefs, a three-panel painting based on a collage from 1962, will be shown by itself at 502 West 22nd street. This work marks the first time Kelly has used a metallic color in a painting.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hardcover publication, with essays by Robert Storr, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Christopher Bedford, and Tricia Y. Paik.

Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923) lives and works in upstate New York. His first one-person exhibition in New York was at The Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956. Since 1958, Kelly’s work has been included in four Whitney Biennial exhibitions, five Carnegie Internationals, four Documenta exhibitions, and twice at the Venice Biennale, including a room of his recent paintings in 2007. Retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1979); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1996).

[Image: Ellsworth Kelly “Four Panels” (2012)]