Beschreibung:

Ellsworth Kelly Green black 1968 oil on canvas 95 x 68 in. (241.3 x 172.7 cm.) Initialed and dated “EK 68” on the reverse; further signed and dated “Kelly 1968” on the stretcher.
Provenance Sidney Janis Gallery, New York Collection of Carter Burden, New York Sotheby Parke Bernet Inc., New York, Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, May 15 and 16, 1980, lot 529 Private Collection, Chicago Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, November 7, 2011, lot 26 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, An Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly October 7 – November 7, 1968, (cover illustration) New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, December 16, 1969 – February 1, 1970 Literature J. Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly 1971, pl. 205 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “Each work of art is a fragment of a larger context… . I’ve always been interested in things that I see that don’t make sense out of context, that lead you into something else.” ELLSWORTH KELLY 1991 Breaking with his contemporaries, Ellsworth Kelly led a trailblazing career, forging an iconic status among the great American Twentieth Century painters; his exultation of both shape and color revolutionized the meaning of fgurative expression. Celebrating the visual richness of the world around us while projecting uniquely as artforms, Kelly’s brave canvases aim for our most instinctual familiarities. The present lot, Green Black, 1968, came to life during the beginning of Kelly’s experimentation into two-panel pieces, as he sought to widen both his and the viewer’s chromatic vocabulary by establishing relationships between shape and color. Though most of Kelly’s uses of multiple colors resulted in respective panels for each hue, the present lot defes this trend—its chromatic split is a result of painterly precision rather than an assemblage of canvases. In allowing them to share a panel, Kelly eliminates the distance between the two colors. Besides his virtuosic display of technical brilliance, here Kelly tests us in the art of mental relaxation, as he dares the viewer to release our tendency to see an optical illusion. Kelly’s technique employs vivid color felds and allows for dynamic interaction—critically falling into the Hard-edge school of painting. Kelly has historically found inspiration in environmental sources. While Green Black, 1968 can trace its structural and chromatic origin to the natural world, it is wholly nonrepresentational. It is in this elimination of connotations that Kelly yields his profound power: “to objectify color and form and to distill its essence from the world of reality, drawing on human emotion, imagination, and spirit” (D. Waldman. Ellsworth Kelly New York, 1996, p. 38). Kelly’s painting prompts an equally emotive response from the viewer. It is a technique similar to the work of Mark Rothko; both artists employ the visceral capacity of pure color as a trigger for human reaction. The precise division between the pitch black and bright green of Green Black, 1968, displays stark contrast, yet also coexistence. The border shared between both colors lends Kelly’s geometric work a quality of seamless union. Upon closer inspection, the surface allows no hint at its creation; Kelly’s subtle brushstrokes display no overlap of color or traces of his hand, demonstrating his technical prowess. Within the structure of Kelly’s canvas, two painted shapes take on the visual appearance of a two-dimensional cube. The disjointed proportions lead the viewer to question the dimensions of this cube; were it rendered three-dimensionally, would the fgure’s sides be warped to accommodate the curious lengths of its edges? Since Green Black, 1968 exists only in two-dimensional space, this contemplation is lef unresolved. The concept of optical illusion contradicts Kelly’s objectives. He aims to produce a pre-Euclidean version of the world, to subtract all modern notions of geometry and intellectual process that inhibit emotional response. To achieve this, he counter intuitively presents shapes