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2/5/2002

Ellsworth Kelly

The Drawing Center, New York

Ellsworth Kelly, Tablet 1948 - 1973

New York - 188 works created by Ellsworth Kelly out of hundreds of smaller drawings will be shown for the first time in The Drawing Center’s exhibition Tablet 1948 -1973. The opening reception will be on May 2 nd , 2002, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm, at 35 Wooster Street. Marking The Drawing Center’s 25 th Anniversary, the exhibition allows a look at the creative development of one of America’s preeminent contemporary artists during a prolific and pivotal period of his career. On display will be colorful sketches, collages, and cutouts of Kelly’s preliminary concepts and ideas for what developed into large-scale paintings and sculptures. Curated by Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University, the exhibition will remain on view through July 24, 2002.

Tablet captures the artist’s observations and random thoughts, as well as grand recurrent themes, during a 25-year period. Resembling a large notepad, Tablet functions like an atlas of Kelly’s visual thinking. It consists of minute descriptions and drawings made on scraps of paper, such as newspaper clippings, letters, envelopes, and gallery invitations that have been cut and marked by the artist. In the early 1970s, the artist mounted these visual notes, amassed over the years, into a formal body of work. Seen together for the first time at The Drawing Center, Tablet enables the viewer to trace a line back through time to Kelly’s earliest inspirations. Remnants of Kelly’s personal history appear frequently in this series. In a tablet from the 1950s, a cutout shape reveals its origins as an envelope addressed to Agnes Martin at Coenties Slip, where Kelly also had a studio. The "X" form cut from the envelope was shaped by chance during one of Kelly’s ongoing exercises in automatism. This experiment lead to other sketches and doodles, which became the basis for the paintings South Ferry (1956) and Red White (1962), and the painted aluminum sculpture Gate (1959).

The Tablet drawings are playful, evocative, and informative instructional tools that clearly illustrate Kelly’s abundant, yet focused, imagination. In an assemblage from the 1950s and 60s a line of triangular forms are displayed above a map of Vermont with sketches and a flattened snow cone wrapper. The triangles, placed at different angles, appear to dance across the page. A recurrent shape in Kelly’s oeuvre, the triangle, is the focus of the Black Curve series of the 70s and Curves of the 90s. The floating layout of the triangles also suggests the bronze sculpture Houston Triptych, created for the Cullen Sculpture Gardens at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1986. The snow cone wrapper, obviously found on the street, brings to mind the cor-ten steel sculpture Curve I, 1973, that was created specifically to be displayed on the ground.

THE ARTIST Kelly began his art studies in 1941 at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1943, he was drafted into the war, after which he moved to Paris, where he lived for six years. His years in Paris were formative in establishing recurring interests and themes that he has employed throughout his long career. Striving for a new form of visual expression, Kelly came to his vision rapidly, utilizing the context of the grid, the concept of chance, and the processes of transfer drawing, found forms, and collage. He returned to the United States in 1954, and in 1956 settled into a studio in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. There he joined a community of artists that included Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana, and Jack Youngerman, with whom he had studied with in Paris. During this period, Kelly continued working with found abstract shapes, and began to utilize curved lines in his drawings and paintings.

Drawing upon interests and ideas formulated in Paris during the early 1950s, Kelly made strictly geometric paintings derived from found forms that he further abstracted from their original context. In the late 60s, he began experimenting with shaped canvases in the form of trapezoids, rhomboids, and triangles in monochrome panels of primary colors. His work of the early 70s was directly affected by his move to upper New York State, where the local architecture influenced his shaped canvases. During the period of 1973-78, Kelly reduced his palette primarily to black, white, and gray, concentrating on the form of his canvases and expanded his vocabulary of shapes to include non-geometric elements.

In the 1980s, Kelly continued integrating curves, angles, straight edges, and concave and convex edges in his paintings. In the early 1990s, Kelly revisited an idea he explored in the 1960s, juxtaposing geometrical canvases in dynamic arrangements within a monochrome palette. Singular, monolithic paintings and sculptures in abstracted geometric forms dominated his work in the later part of the decade. Today, Kelly continues to create artwork in a multiplicity of mediums. His paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs reflect his observant, refined eye, and have become familiar icons of contemporary art.

Ellsworth Kelly’s work is included in the collections of museums throughout the world. His distinguished career includes retrospective exhibitions at: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1982; The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1987; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996. He has represented the United States in the XXXIII Venice Biennale, 1966; Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany, 1992; and participated in the XXXVI American Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1979.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
On Monday, May 13 at 7:30 pm The Drawing Center will present Ellsworth Kelly in conversation with Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University, is an authority on the work of Ellsworth Kelly. He has written extensively on the artist and is curator of The Drawing Center’s exhibition Tablet 1948 - 1973. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. His influential writings focus on post-war art, most recently Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry and Essays on European and American Art from 1965 to 1975. Forthcoming is the monograph on Gerhard Richter. Together with Kelly they will address Tablet, its context and relation to other major works, such as Richter’s Atlas.

PUBLICATIONS
Accompanying this groundbreaking exhibition is a limited-edition book, Ellsworth Kelly, Tablet 1948 - 1973. Only 250 copies of the large-format hand-bound publication, which reproduces all of the 188 works in the exhibition, will be available. The book totals 384 pages, is printed in full color and individually packaged for presentation. Each book will be numbered and signed by Ellsworth Kelly.
The Drawing Center is also publishing a full-color 208-page catalogue with an essay by Yve-Alain Bois. This catalogue will have color plates of each of the 188 works in the exhibition. Additionally, Ellsworth Kelly’s conversation with Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh will be published as Drawing Papers 29. All of the publications reinforce the significant role of drawing in Kelly’s artistic process.

MISSION STATEMENT
The Drawing Center is the only not-for-profit U.S. museum to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary. It was established in 1977 to provide opportunities for emerging and under-recognized artists; to demonstrate the significance and diversity of drawings throughout history; and to stimulate public dialogue on issues of art and culture.

The Drawing Center 35 Wooster Street, NY 10013 New York
Public Viewing Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10-6; Saturday, 11-6; closed Sundays and Mondays.
The Drawing Center is wheelchair accessible.

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