Ellsworth Kelly

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Ellsworth Kelly in his galleries at 502 & 522 West 22nd Street and 523 West 24th Street.

The exhibition includes eleven paintings and five sculptures made in 2013 and 2014, all of which are exhibited here for the first time.

Kelly’s newest works continue his nearly seven-decade exploration of color and form. The paintings are executed in oil on canvas, built up with many layers of luminous color, including red, bright yellow, dark blue, pale gray, brown, white, and black. The paintings include shaped canvases, multiple canvases joined end to end, and canvases superimposed to create three-dimensional reliefs.

For the first time in over thirty years, Kelly has created a group of colored sculptures. Painted the three primary colors and black, the wall-mounted aluminum sculptures are over seven feet tall. Their vividly colored matte surfaces extend several inches from the wall, casting shadows that become an integral part of the works.

A fully illustrated hardcover publication, Ellsworth Kelly: Outside In, accompanies the exhibition.

Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923) lives and works in upstate New York. His first one-person exhibition was in Paris in 1951, and since that time he has had more than 150 solo exhibitions worldwide. His work has been included in four Documentas, two Venice Biennales, five Carnegie Internationals, and four Whitney Biennials. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others.