Ellsworth Kelly

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Ellsworth Kelly: Paris–Amsterdam, 1950–1954, the artist’s second solo show with the gallery and the first at our Paris location. This exhibition is curated by Éric de Chassey, who writes:

“When Peter Freeman told me he wanted to organize an Ellsworth Kelly exhibition in his Paris gallery, I thought that the best would be to show works that had been made in Paris and decided to present paintings from 1950–1951, some of which had been shown in 1951 in Kelly's first solo exhibition at Galerie Arnaud in Paris, and only shown one more time since then, on the occasion of Kelly's 1992 groundbreaking exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–1954).

Although based on anti-compositional strategies such as transfer and chance, they visually recall works from the pioneers of abstract painting, such as Mondrian or Taeuber-Arp. When Kelly returned to the USA, in 1954, he wanted to be seen as completely separate from European abstraction, but these exceptional paintings testify to the strong transatlantic nature of his work and his exceptional ability to reinvent and go beyond the achievements of previous generations of artists.

I see this exhibition as a great opportunity to reexamine the importance of these works among the oeuvre of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. That's why I have chosen to present them on the ground floor, while supplementing with small collages he made just before leaving Europe, in 1954, while he was in the Netherlands. These collages—never exhibited before and which will be shown in the basement room—confront the legacy of Mondrian in an exceptional way, while foregrounding many later developments in Kelly's American oeuvre.”

Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923, Newburgh, New York; d. 2015, Spencertown, New York) was one of the foremost 20th-century American artists and revolutionized abstract art through his monochromatic and large-scale multi-panel paintings. After returning to New York in 1954, he had his first exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery two years later. In 1973, The Museum of Modern Art, New York organized his first major retrospective. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Éric de Chassey (b. 1965) is an art historian, university professor, and the director of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.