Exhibit of the week: Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety

At Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Through June 29

Ellsworth Kelly “has always looked at objects differently than anyone else,” said Elizabeth Sobieski in HuffingtonPost.com. In mid-century New York, when many artists were in thrall to abstract expressionism, the recently repatriated World War II veteran pursued an interest in the simplest intersections of form, line, and color—the random patches on a beach cabana, or the windows of a museum. “I wanted to make something I hadn’t seen yet,” he said. Across the six interceding decades, Kelly “has pushed abstract art to its minimalist limits,” largely by inventing countless ways to wring new effects from monochromatic color fields, said Samuel Cochran in ArchitecturalDigest.com. To celebrate his 90th birthday, museums and galleries around the country are mounting shows this year that pay homage to Kelly’s accomplishments in painting, collage, and sculpture. Together, the shows offer “vivid testimony to his genius.”

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“There is something to be said for quiet consistency across a lifetime,” said Sarah Douglasin GalleristNY.com. At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which is currently exhibiting one of Kelly’s 1970s series, a side gallery displays works on paper that the artist made in 1951 while he was living in Paris. Intended for a book he hoped to publish, they serve as “a sort of dictionary of abstract forms” that set a blueprint for everything to come. Kelly began making shaped canvases in 1966, then created a 1971 series that explored the various potential effects of combining two monochromatic rectangles in an inverted L. Each work is “all about the details”—the thickness of the stretcher, the particular hue of each color field, said A.M. Homes in The Guardian (U.K.). “Part magician, part mathematician, he works with the precision and clarity of a poet,” but also with the “boyish jubilation” of a much younger man.

In fact, Kelly is “making some of his strongest work right now,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Black Form II, a recent work that appears at a Matthew Marks Gallery show, turns a bulbous shape from one of Kelly’s 1962 collages into “a funny, suggestive, magnificent wall relief,” a 7-foot capital C fabricated in aluminum and painted a glossy black. Then there’s the oil painting Yellow Relief Over Blue, also created just last year, which pairs color fields of canary yellow and an intense blue in such a way that it evokes “a sunrise from the sun’s point of view.” Such wily allusions lend warmth to Kelly’s works. Yet “the very best of them are so perfectly made” that we see them not as physical objects but as pure visual effects.