Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly ( born May 31, 1923 in Newburgh, Orange County, New York) is an American painter and sculptor. Kelly is one of the main representatives of the picturesque style Hard Edge.
Life
Ellsworth Kelly was born the son of an insurance agent in Newburgh and grew up in Oradell ( NJ ). From 1941 to 1943 he studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He served from 1943 to 1945 during World War II, where he participated in the Battle of Brittany. After the war, Kelly attended from 1946 to 1948, the " School of The Museum of Fine Arts" in Boston and then went to Paris for further study at the École nationale supérieure des beaux -arts. In 1950, he taught for a year at the " American School " in Paris and visited the studios of Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Francis Picabia, Georges Vantongerloo, Alberto Magnelli, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber- Arp. In 1954 he returned to the United States and moved into a studio apartment on Broad Street in New York. A little later he moved into a loft in Coenties Slip adjacent to Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. In 1970 he moved into a studio in Chatham as well as a residential house near Spencertown, where he still lives today.
Work
Ellsworth Kelly's images that belong to the style of Hard Edge, characterized by geometric surfaces, which collide with intense color, with hard and sharp contours. His works created Kelly in abstract form with extreme clarity and simplicity. Since 1945, he painted black-and- white images. The panels or stretched on stretcher canvases he proportioned so that independence, and yet unity of form be preserved. The shapes of the panels follow predetermined systems or geometric calculations. In the following years, Kelly turned away from the panels purely geometric held, painted his panels in black, white and gray and tested variations of Paneelpaaren that are along a diagonal interconnected. In 1958 he began free-standing sculptures and manufacture since 1973 totem pole -like sculptures made of steel and aluminum.