Executed in 1979, Ellsworth Kelly‘s iconic Untitled in weathering steel from the famed collects ion of Douglas S. Cramer evidences the artist’s masterful exploration of form, object and architecture, support and ground. Monumental in its size and clean in its structure, Untitled eloquently asserts its presence within space – defying the two-dimensional plan and bringing form out of the pictorial realm into the sculptural. Untitled shows Kelly’s early and daring exploration into defining space and highlights the materiality of the artist’s choice of medium. The artist executes in a manner that is quintessential of his most celebrated work—resounding quietly but confidentially—transforming its environment.

Kelly conceived his shaped works in the 1960s which drew acclaim for their "hard, crisp edges [that] commanded the eye to feel them as the hand would feel soft flesh." (E. C. Goosen in New York, Museum of Modern Art, Sixteen Americans, 1959, p. 31). Cultivating his sculptural canvases in the years to come, Kelly produced this reverential example, executed in steel, in 1979, during the height of his career. The work was then quickly acquired by titan collects or Douglas S. Cramer, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Discussing his passion for art with the New York t.mes s in 1993, Cramer comments “There’s something wonderful in how art is, well, frozen.” Untitled is a fixed, steadfast, and profound magnus opus of Kelly’s body of work.

In its grand scale and thoughtful articulation and defiance of the picture plane, the present work exemplifies Kelly’s unwavering commitment to and rigorous examination of the most fundamental elements of his practice: color or material, shape and form. Though geoMetricas lly simple, Untitled gracefully floats and swells into the three-dimensional space, making the complete shape of the form the foreground and stabilizing the wall as the ground. “Emancipated itself from its customary support, the ground, so that it could from then on lead an independent existence in the visual world," (Gottfried Boehm, "In-Between Spaces" in Exh. Cat., Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Ellsworth Kelly, 2002, p. 33) Untitled stands as an architectural element of the greater environment and invites the viewer to consider the world as a support for form and color. Although Kelly decidedly veers away from Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s, the sublime effect of his works grand scale and intellectual study of color is comparable to Rothko at his most seminal. Here Kelly employs just material as his medium, further collapsing the distance between painting and sculpture.

By utilizing such a blunt and sophisticated economy of means, the artist has addressed the nature of the painted canvas as a structured object, not a field of painterly gesture, with a singular impactful color entirely shifting our perceptions of space. Impelled by naturally occurring abstractions, Kelly eschews literal representation by selecting graceful forms from the physical environment and distilling them to their most minimal formal vocabulary. “I realized I didn't want to compose pictures … I wanted to find them. I felt that my vision was choosing things out there in the world and presenting them. To me the investigation of perception was of the greatest interest. There was so much to see, and it all looked fantastic to me,” Kelly quoted in “A Giant of the New Surveys His Rich Past" in The New York t.mes s. Kelly beautifully captures the formal elements of serendipitous moments - light streaming through a mullioned window, the silhouette of a bird’s wing against the sky, the shape of a leaf folded over onto itself – and elegantly derives those moments into canvases that immediately arrest the viewer into a moment of awe.

IN FOCUS: Ellsworth Kelly from The collects ion of Douglas S. Cramer

Read More