A seminal masterwork, Rebound dates to the onset of Ellsworth Kelly’s highly acclaimed mature practice and is an incomparable embodiment of the artist’s profound impact on twentieth century art. Executed in 1959, Rebound captures Kelly at the very inception of his artistic brilliance as he established a new mode of art-making which radically broke with the Abstract Expressionist dogma that dominated New York City at the t.mes and instead embraced the empirical observation of the natural world and the tensions between the figure and ground. A test.mes nt to the present works importance, Study for Rebound (1955) is held in the permanent collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art and the sister painting Blue White from 1962, is highlighted in the collects ion of the Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts. Acquired directly from the artist in the year of its inception, Rebound has since been held in the esteemed private collects ion of Susanne and Franklin Konigsberg. Longt.mes television producer, agent and nine-t.mes Emmy award winner Franklin Konigsberg and patron of the arts Susanne Konigsberg built a remarkable collects ion in their New York and Los Angeles homes. Franklin Konigsberg produced all of bings Crosby's television specials as well as several telefilms and miniseries for HBO and Showt.mes , some of which included, The Guyana Tragedy, The Last Don, The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Children of the Dust. He was executive producer of numerous feature films including 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) and Paris Trout (1991). Prominent collects ors and philanthropist, Susanne and Franklin Konigsberg, lovingly installed Rebound in their home for over 60 years.

An extraordinary achievement by the artist during what was arguably his most pivotal decade, in the year of its execution, Rebound was included in the groundbreaking exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art alongside other burgeoning icons such as Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Distinguished by its exceptional provenance and exhibition history, Rebound was featured in the 1967 travelling exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, one of the most influential traveling exhibitions of the 1960s, which traveled to Japan, India and Australia and was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Importantly, Rebound was included in both the first retrospective of Ellsworth Kelly’s work in 1973 at the Museum of Modern art and the traveling retrospective of Kelly’s work in 1996-98 at the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tate Gallery and Haus der Kunst, among other museum exhibitions.

Ellsworth Kelly first rose to critical acclaim in the 1950s, during which he had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956, following his return from Paris in 1954. The conceptual framework of Kelly’s paired curves stems from his years in France, where artist John Cahe and Hans Arp encouraged him to experiment with chance and tension, spurring his interest in geometric abstraction. The composition in Rebound, brilliantly captures Ellsworth Kelly's bold employment of form and color to create tension as a source of pictorial energy. After the Sixteen Americans exhibition in 1959, which included Rebound, William Rubin wrote “Kelly's work comes as a refreshing contrast to the fatiguing exploitation of impasto and brushwork typical of New York painting ... Kelly is a marvelous creator of shapes, bold shapes that seem very summary at first but that are really complex and elusive, full of subtle local decisions and unassimilable to formula and geometry.” Balanced within the traditional rectilinear canvas shape, the organic forms of and softly contoured edges vibrate and pulse with an energy that returns the viewer’s attention to the flatness of the canvas and its identity as an object.

Rebound exemplifies Kelly’s career long exploration of the profound effects of tension between the figure and the ground establishing a defiant dynamism within a two-dimensional picture plane. There is a specific sensuality and intimacy in Kelly’s articulation of two forms, touching or barely touching, as Kelly described how he came to develop this method during his years in France, he described “ "The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting. Instead of making a picture that was an interpretation of a thing seen, or a picture of invented content, I found an object and ‘presented’ it as itself alone.” (Ellsworth Kelly quoted in Diane Upright, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. 9) The arresting complexity of the paired stark cream curves that barely meet creates a remarkable optical effect, lending an sensational depth and intricacy to the monochromatic forms.

In its striking scale, chromatic simplicity and esoteric articulation of the picture plane, the present work exemplifies Kelly’s unwavering commitment to the most fundamental elements of painting: color, shape and form. The figure-ground effect creates ambiguity, the stark contrast of the edges against the cream curve and the precise claritys of the shapes allow the space and shapes to appear to flux acutely, creating an optical effect. As described by artist, curator and critic John Coplans “In Rebound, for instance, two slightly different arcs of a circle subdivide the plane, yet.mes et in the center to create sensual white ovoidal forms divided by two cusp like black intrusions. But the black-and-white forms cannot be read simultaneously-only one can be read at any given moment, though the contiguous boundary of either the black or the white form is continuously shaped and mediated by the process of flux.” (John Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, New York, 1971, p. 68) Kelly vividly articulates his triumphant pursuit of form and color, exploring their relationship to physical space through the acute tension of the monochromatic paired curves.

In Rebound, Kelly’s process of seeing is distinctly articulated and his artistic vision is simultaneously reduced to its most simplified and complex form. Inspired by naturally occurring organic abstractions, Kelly eschews literal representation by selecting graceful forms from the physical environment and distilling them to their most minimal formal vocabulary. As American art critic Eugen Goossen describes, “When round and straight.mes et-the ball on the floor, the egg on the table-precariousness and unpredictability come into the picture. The artist's solution then must turn back toward quiescence, or at least balance. In such a picture as Rebound, 1959 (page 70), where soft.mes ets soft (like the pressurized curves of two balloons) but is designed hard and crisp, it is difficult to tell which way things will go…But Kelly, through the precision of the drawing, the surface tension across a texturally undifferentiated field of canvas, and perhaps because he has made this a "night" picture (where white is form and black is void), succeeds in suggesting the possibilities without leaving us in doubt about the outcome.” (E. C. Goosen, Ellsworth Kelly, 1973, p.73) Ellsworth Kelly’s Rebound captures the beauty of a serendipitous moment, like two leaves briefly overlapping or fruit positioned together, elegantly illustrating ineffable tranquility and sublime balance.

Artist

Ellsworth Kelly