Ellsworth Kelly
American, 1923–2015
Kelly had already published two major series of lithographs with Maeght Editeur in Paris in the early 60s, but it was in the 70s that he turned to printmaking as a sustained endeavour. An ambitious printmaker, he produced an extensive body of over 300 editions that are intimately related to his work in other media. Even when he appropriates the shape of a painting or collage, Kelly scrupulously adjusts it to the printed image, reassessing new reciprocities among shape, printed coloured inks, paper and scale.
Untitled [for Obama], 2012
Orange, 2004
Although Kelly worked with screenprinting and intaglio processes and used paper itself as a medium in the 'Colored Paper Images', lithography has been his medium of choice. The greasy lithographic inks that are absorbed into the paper have the richness of oil paints and an appealing subdued lightness. And it is the transparency and luminosity of these media that imbues Kelly’s lithographs with their liveliness and radiance.
Kelly’s art is based upon perception. He appropriates fragments of chanced-upon visual experience- bits of architecture, the human figure, water reflections, shadows- and abstracts them into taut, iconic images of broadly articulated shape and saturated color, lyrical and serenely self-confident in effect.
—Richard H. Axom, The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997), 13
Untitled, 1973