Executed in 2014, Red White is a large work from Ellsworth Kelly’s last great series of paintings. It consists of four conjoined canvases; a masterful fusion of sculpture and painting and a monumental ode to this artist’s most advanced explorations of form and colour. In keeping with the best of this artist’s work, Red White transcends abstraction, exuding a sense of vitality that defies the two-dimensional plane. It is an arresting and immediate work that confronts the viewer head-on. Indeed, it is tribute to the consistency of Kelly’s practice that this work, completed at the denouement of his career, reminds one so strongly of the stat.mes nt he made to John Cage in a letter written in 1950: “I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures… We must make our art like the Egyptians… It should meet the eye – direct” (E. Kelly, cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, 1996, p. 11).

By the t.mes that Kelly created the present work, he had been manipulating the traditional painter’s canvas for some 55 years; either through multiple conjoined panels as in the case of the present work, or through shaped fields of single colours. Conflating painting, sculpture, and relief, Kelly saw these manipulations as a vivid and graphically stimulating reference to his viewers’ immediate and unmediated visual experience of the physical world. However, all experience, whether physical or spiritual, is certainly mediated by the context in which it is presented, and thus becomes subjective. The experience thus cannot be entirely elevated above physical and terrestrial concerns. Indeed, when Kelly's geometric abstractions were first exhibited in 1959, they were already perceived as having “hard, crisp edges [that] commanded the eye to feel them as the hand would feel soft flesh” and were thus immediately associated with humanity and its corporeal presence (E. C. Goosen in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Sixteen Americans, 1959, p. 31). This apparent worldly basis is unsurprising, given the works are anchored in precise sources of naturally occurring abstraction: the 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. These points of reference – so skilfully and austerely stripped down to their most fundamental components – ground Kelly’s art in a physical space, while simultaneously revealing a post-war preoccupation with alternate methods of representation and the viewer’s perception of the final product, and indeed prefiguring Andy Warhol’s manipulation of photographs of shadows to create his pivotal Shadow abstracts in the late 1970s. As Simon Schama has explained, Kelly’s works are born from “perceptual serendipity – in a shadow, a reflection, a partly obscured object or shape – from which he then shears away a visual fragment” (S. Schama cited in: Rachel Cooke, ‘Ellsworth Kelly: ‘I want to live another 15 years’, The Guardian, November 8 2015, online).

By utilising 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, using one or two colours to shift our perceptions of space. With his self-imposed minimal artistic vocabulary, Kelly has succeeded in experimenting with perception without diluting what he considered to be the fundamental factors of artistic representation – colour and form. In a 1964 interview with Henry Geldzahler, the artist stated: "I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and white – the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be" (E. Kelly, cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, 1996, p. 11).

Red White succeeds in prompting the viewer to question the very nature of what painting is or can be. The culmination of a hugely important series of works whose influence extends from the contemporary sculpture of Richard Serra to iconic pieces by artists such as Robert Morris and Frank Stella, Kelly’s legacy is one of liberation: liberating painting from the limitations of a frame; liberating the picture plane; liberating the viewer by engaging a more participatory experience. Surrounded by action painters, colour-field painters, Minimalists and Pop artists, Kelly forged a visual vocabulary and oeuvre that was entirely his own. Defining space without dominating it, the present work creates its own reality, one that resounds with the profundity of Kelly's practice.