Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings

Description

Ellsworth Kelly ranks among America's foremost contemporary artists. Born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York, he developed an independent style during his years spent in France after the Second World War. Today his work is closely associated with the abstract hard- edge painting of the sixties as well as color field painting and minimal art. Kelly's works distill the visible world to a purity of line, form and color. From the outset he has concerned himself with the connection between abstraction and nature, the interaction between space and surface, silhouette and contour, figure and ground— fundamental artistic questions to which he found groundbreaking answers not only in his abstract-geometric works. His strikingly delicate plant drawings and watercolors, which have been an integral part of his creative work for over six decades, are also expressions of this interest and involvement. Kelly himself views these fragile figurations as "a kind of bridge to a way of seeing that was the basis of the very first abstract paintings," a way of seeing that was the springboard for his entire later output.

This book, the first ever dedicated solely to Kelly's plant drawings, appears in conjunction with an exhibition organized jointly by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Texts by the two curators—Michael Semff in Munich and Marla Prather in New York— provide an analysis of Ellsworth Kelly's plant drawings within the context of his oeuvre.

240 pages, 108 color plates, 13 illustrations. 10 1/4'' x 13''. Hardcover, clothbound, with jacket.

• 240 pages
• 10 1/4'' x 13''
• Hardcover
• Clothbound, with jacket