Ellsworth Kelly

In celebration of Ellsworth Kelly’s 90th birthday in May 2013, The Museum of Modern Art will present the first exhibition in forty years of the fourteen paintings that comprise the first series of works the artist produced after leaving New York City for Spencertown, in upstate New York, in 1970. The studio in Chatham where Kelly worked after moving upstate was an abandoned theatre, more spacious than any the artist had previously occupied. The fourteen large-scale paintings he produced there in the year after his arrival all rely on a single formal concept – each `L’-shaped work is made of two joined canvases of pure monochrome colour – yet the works vary in colour and proportion from one to the next. The series has not been exhibited in its entirety since it was presented at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1972, just a year after the paintings were finished. The richly illustrated Ellsworth Kelly: The Chatham Series, published in conjunction with the exhibition, includes an essay by Ann Temkin that traces the artist’s explorations of shape, colour and spatiality from the early 1950s to today, and provides an in-depth look at a significant period in the artist’s oeuvre.