Louisiana on paper: Ellsworth Kelly

The series of small, concentrated exhibitions under the heading Louisiana – on paper continues in 2012 with one of America’s greatest living artists, Ellsworth Kelly, b. 1923 and living in New York. The exhibition is showing 40 drawings of plants and flowers from the decades during which the artist has been active. A stay in France in the years 1948-54 laid the basis for Kelly’s lifelong fascination with and close observation of nature, and this was where Kelly developed his abstract visual idiom, inspired by artists like Monet, Hans Arp and Matisse.

Kelly’s drawings are art of supreme excellence. The translation of the gaze into the motion of the hand is a central theme in Kelly’s plant drawings, executed with a simplicity and care and a love of form where the fine contour of the plant and the distinctive musical gesture of the line vibrate in the finished work. It is the simple movements of the hand on the paper that bring forth the subject in all its simplicity. And yet it is not the subject that is crucial to his work, it is rather the connection with the world through motion, where form, silhouette and contour are made to alternate between space and surface as lines on paper.

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most significant artists of the post-war era. He followed on the heels of the Abstract Expressionists and turned the focus on the dynamic relationships of contour, form and colour, and thus on the perception of space. Kelly cannot be pigeonholed in any artistic school, but has exerted a major influence on Minimalism, Hard Edge painting, Color Field and Pop Art, experimenting for example with canvases in new formats. The artist is represented in the Louisiana collection with six works.

Louisiana – on paper
The exhibition series focuses on graphic works and drawings on paper, and they are all curated by Louisiana’s director Poul Erik Tøjner. The first artist in the series was the American Al Taylor (1948-1999). The next was Josef Albers (1888-1976) and the latest artist presented by the museum was Vija Celmins, born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and now living in New York. All three artists are represented in Louisiana’s collection.