Glenstone Museum stages a loving survey of Ellsworth Kelly’s career

Ellsworth Kelly at 100
Glenstone
Potomac, Maryland
By means of March 2024

Arts establishments everywhere in the world have been breaking out their hard-edge abstraction canvases to rejoice the one centesimal birthday of the late painter Ellsworth Kelly. The Edward Hopper Home in Nyack is hanging his lithographs of waterways; the Artwork Institute of Chicago is displaying a group of portraits; the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork is displaying early drawings from Paris. However the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) offered Ellsworth Kelly: A Centennial Celebration in its atrium, notably highlighting Sculpture for a Giant Wall (1957), initially created for Philadelphia’s Transportation Constructing and its Greyhound Bus Terminal. Kelly had first designed brass screens for the Put up Home restaurant within the Transportation Constructing. Upon seeing these designs, the constructing’s architect, Vincent Kling, commissioned Kelly to make a big piece for the constructing. This piece was initially titled Transportation Constructing Foyer Sculpture earlier than being rebranded to, presumably, make it extra sellable. Forty-four toes of panels tilt and curve at quite a lot of angles, catching and bouncing the sunshine in new methods all through the day because the solar strikes. Whereas summary metallic wall sculptures have now turn into commonplace in transit hubs worldwide, Kelly’s work was a blueprint, providing an thrilling and upbeat break from custom when it was first put in.

Public artwork can seize a commuters’ consideration and improve their day-to-day travels, however it may additionally fade into the background, functioning as an ambient accompaniment to the look forward to one’s bus. Perversely, the MoMA set up—billed as a celebration of Kelly’s profession—served as a reminder of this dynamic. For a lot of the exhibition’s run, the atrium grew to become a queueing spot for museumgoers wanting to view the Guillermo del Toro exhibition that includes units and puppets from Pinocchio. Whereas the stanchioned-off line actually offered alternatives for guests to come across the repurposed Transportation Constructing sculpture, it actually wasn’t the primary occasion. Individuals checked out their telephones, chatted with one another, and nervously requested gallery attendants simply how lengthy the road would take—an expertise most likely fairly like these studying newspapers and killing time whereas ready for the Greyhound in Fifties Philly.

Maybe essentially the most formidable centennial Kelly exhibition is at Glenstone, a difficult-to-access, non-public up to date artwork museum situated about an hour’s drive from Washington, D.C., amongst rolling hills planted with wildflowers. Unfold out throughout many galleries in Glenstone’s Pavilions area, designed by Thomas Phifer and Companions, the present guides guests roughly chronologically by means of the lengthy sweep of Kelly’s profession.

The primary galleries provide a glimpse into Kelly’s time in Paris within the late Forties and early Fifties, when he was first compelled to scale back the structure round him into hard-edged shapes and contours. A Kilometer Marker (1949) turns into a semicircle atop a rectangle; the Seine (1951) is lowered to a grid of black-and-white rectangles that really feel virtually pointillist. As Kelly’s profession progressed, he started to push his works past the constraints of the oblong canvas, incorporating the unfavorable area on the partitions surrounding these works, as in 1956’s Portray in Three Panels, and reshaping and embracing a third-dimension, as in 1978’s White Curves II. In a uncommon act of appropriation, the trapezoidal Inexperienced Panel (Floor Zero), from 2011, traces {a photograph} of the previous website of the World Commerce Middle, providing a quiet, indirect memorial.

The exhibition lovingly surveys Kelly’s profession, providing up some perennial hits like 1953’s Tiger and the 2014 installment of his decades-long exploration of Spectrums. At occasions, nonetheless, the exhibition, curated by Glenstone’s director, Emily Wei Rales, appears as involved with solidifying the establishment’s status as an vital participant within the up to date artwork world because it does with offering guests an outline of Kelly’s profession. The exhibition is mostly gentle on didactic textual content: There aren’t any small labels offering curatorial perception subsequent to particular person artworks— solely titles, dates, and institutional info, presumably to let guests take within the works on their very own phrases. Every room does function a quick paragraph or two introducing main themes in Kelly’s work and highlighting key items of his oeuvre. These key works predominantly come from Glenstone’s assortment, not from the collections of among the notable establishments (MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork, and lots of extra) that lent to the present.

Yellow Curve (1990) enlarges Kelly’s earlier formed canvases to huge scale (25 by 24 toes) and strikes from the wall to the ground in a room separate from the remainder of the exhibition that appears to be particularly designed to accommodate the work, which was initially commissioned by and created for Portikus, a up to date artwork establishment in Frankfurt. Whereas Kelly actually had many monumental works—the wingspan of the wall sculpture proven at MoMA is even bigger than Yellow Curve’s—this work feels uniquely huge. The sculpture’s yellow paint virtually glows, as Wei Rales notes in a printed-out e-mail, one among many Yellow Curve–associated research and ephemera in an adjoining room. If earlier works like Portray in Three Panels tried to include the wall’s unfavorable area into the paintings, Yellow Curve appears to subsume everything of the area (the partitions, the ground, the ceiling, even the entryway) into the paintings, successfully blurring the road between the place structure ends and paintings begins.

Kevin Ritter is the managing editor of City Omnibus.