Looking at his paintings, Ellsworth Kelly suggests, is “on the same level as looking at your shirt.” He taps my arm. “I’m not interested in depiction–I’m interested in literal space. Our eyes are open all the time, we use our eyes to live, but we don’t play, we don’t investigate. I’ve always been investigating perception, since I was a kid.” A leading exponent of hard-edge abstraction, Kelly says, “I feel my thrust all along was trying to do one color, one shape. It took me 40 years to really do that well.”
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Kelly traces the six new monochrome paintings recently installed in the indoor courtyard of the Rice Building at the Art Institute back to 1949–the second year of six he spent in Paris, when he first began to extract pure shapes from such ordinary things as windows. Those roots can be seen in “Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955,” also in the Rice Building (both exhibitions open Saturday).
Kelly compares the rectangular area where each painting is hung, defined by moldings and doorways, to the white ground of a canvas. He carefully planned their shapes and positions on the wall–and feels he got their placement right: “If you move one just a bit counterclockwise, it begins to appear to fall.” Because the shapes are unfamiliar–four have only straight edges, two also have curves, and there are no right angles–they also call attention to themselves and to the space around them. Kelly notes that the columns pass in front of the paintings as you move. “That creates a fragmentation in the panels, which I like very much.”
