Ellsworth
Kelly, born in 1923, is one of America's most important and also most original
artists since 1945. His extremely striking pictorial language has been reduced
to the simplest fundamentals. He first became known when he moved beyond the rectangular
canvases traditionally used by painters and created works for the wall and the
floor that reach out into the space around them.
Kelly has been working in parallel in the fields of painting and sculpture since
the late fifties. The exhibition concentrates on the important impulses those
two arts have transmitted to his work. Four rooms in which individual works dating
from between 1956 and 2002 appear as impressive ensembles have been arranged by
Kelly himself to suit the museum’s premises. Those ensembles explore the
“in-between spaces” in his work, the interrelationships between painting
and wall, sculpture and space, figure and ground.
The Fondation Beyeler, in cooperation with Ellsworth Kelly, is staging the first
one-man show of his paintings and sculptures in Switzerland.