Ellsworth Kelly, Painting for a White Wall, 1952, oil on canvas, five joined panels. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
Doha, Qatar: This October, Qatar Museums will present Ellsworth Kelly at 100, a major survey exhibition commemorating the late artist’s seven-decade career and the first retrospective of his work in the MENASA region.
Organised by Glenstone Museum (Maryland, U.S.A), the exhibition marks what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday in 2023 and is one of the largest retrospectives of Kelly’s work in the 21st century.
The presentation will be on view at M7, Qatar’s epicentre for innovation and entrepreneurship in design, fashion, and technology, from October 31, 2024 to February, 2025.
Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is regarded as one of the most significant American painters and sculptors.
Throughout his career, the artist drew inspiration from nature and the world around him to create a singular style that shaped American abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The comprehensive presentation will chart the artist’s lifelong exploration of the relationship between form, colour, line, and space through key works drawn from pivotal periods in his career.
Works on view will span the wide range of media in which the artist worked, from painting and sculpture to works on paper, collage, and photography.
Highlights include formative early paintings such as Painting for a White Wall, 1952, a groundbreaking work composed of joined monochromatic panels, and Painting in Three Panels, 1956, a key example of Kelly’s engagement with architecture.
These early works will be on view alongside examples from the now canonical Chatham and Spectrum series.
A selection of the plant drawings Kelly created throughout his career will feature prominently, alongside a selection of rarely exhibited photographs.
Also featured will be Yellow Curve, 1990, the first work in Kelly’s series of large-scale, floor-based paintings, which will be displayed in a custom-designed space.
Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Curve, 1990, acrylic on canvas on wood. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
The installation encompasses more than 60 metres (600 square feet) of floor space and is emblematic of the artist’s examination of the relationship between colour and architecture.
Ellsworth Kelly, Chatham V: Red Blue, 1971, oil on canvas, two joined panels. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
Maha Ghanim Al Sulaiti, director of M7, said,
“By refining his craft over the course of seventy years, Ellsworth Kelly showed how paying close attention to the seemingly simplest things can yield marvelous insights.
Our mission with Ellsworth Kelly at 100 at M7 is to spark the same kind of excitement and curiosity in our visitors that guided him over the course of his career. We hope that Kelly’s pared-down forms and bright, bold colours will inspire local and visiting audiences to pay closer attention to the creativity that marks the world around them.”
Emily Wei Rales, director and co-founder of Glenstone, said, “At Glenstone Museum, we present art that fundamentally alters the ways we see the world. Few artists have done so with as much grace and elegance as Ellsworth Kelly, and it is an honour to collaborate with Qatar Museums to introduce this groundbreaking artist’s work to the Gulf region.”
The exhibition will feature nearly 70 works drawn from Glenstone’s collection and those of major international museum lenders, including Centre Pompidou, Paris;
Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Major works have also generously been made available from the Ellsworth Kelly Studio and private collections.
Ellsworth Kelly at 100 first debuted at Glenstone on 4 May 2023, and then travelled to Paris as Ellsworth Kelly.
Shapes and Colors, 1949 - 2015, which is currently on view at the Foundation Louis Vuitton through 9 September 2024.
The presentation of Ellsworth Kelly at 100 in Doha is a legacy project of the Qatar–USA 2021 Year of Culture, a year-long programme of collaborations between institutions across both countries.
