Blue Curve

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the major representatives of US American colour field painting which developed in the 1950s. After the Second World War, Kelly remained in Paris for a longer period and had contact with the French Surrealists above all with Sophie Taeuber- and Jean Arp who had a lasting influence on him. He began, as did Jean Arp, to work with monochrome flat forms that were ordered randomly. Kelly’s approach to painting did not derive from a theoretical consideration of painting and its conceptual fundamentals. His work was based much more on his personal perception, visual experiences which he transferred into form and colour from memory. This is a sensual approach to painting and regards it as an experience of the world. It is fundamentally different to the rationalist approach of early modernity and the Bauhaus, even if, at first glance, his strict, geometric compositions would not suggest that. Kelly’s formal pictorial solutions, over decades and throughout many work series, are based on a masterful control of the relationship of form and space. ‘Blue Curve’ from 1964 is a traditional rectangular format and was painted at the same time as Kelly’s early ‘shaped canvases’. As always, the artist refrained from using painterly brushwork and figurative elements. The use of uniformly intense colour produces an impression of infinity and depth that originates on the surface and points towards the picture’s volume. The organically curved brilliant blue surface expands out from the left and, following the direction of the gaze, touches even the right edge of the picture. This builds a compositional tension where the pictorial surface seems to burst out of the rectangular picture format.