Ellsworth Kelly’s Colors for a Large Wall, with Fan, at MoMA (All Photos By Gail)
Confession: I am obsessive about taking photographs of art that includes no people in the frame. To achieve this goal requires great patience. There is no telling how long you will need to wait for one or more endlessly dawdling, selfie-snapping, oblivious art fans to GTF out of your way so you can get the shot. It is a character-builder, for sure.
Continue reading More Spy Pics of People Looking at Art
We had a day off work this past Monday for President’s Day, so I took myself to the Museum of Modern Art to check out Guillermo del Toro’s Crafting Pinnocchio exhibit (which is just fantastic) and catch Meret Oppenheim’s My Exhibit before closes on March 4th (also excellent). The museum is also celebrating the centennial of the late Ellsworth Kelly’s career with an installation in the atrium gallery which includes his monumental Sculpture for a Large Wall.
Continue reading Instagram Photo of the Week: Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall
Images Courtesy of USPS
America artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015), whose work I have often covered here on ‘The Gig, forged a distinctive style of abstraction over his seven decades as an artist. On May 31st, 2019 Kelly was commemorated with 10 U.S. Postal Service stamps highlighting his work. Amazing!
Continue reading New U.S. Postage Stamps Honor American Minimalist Ellsworth Kelly
Photo By Gail
While living and working in Paris, from 1948 to 1954, Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015) developed an abstract vocabulary of line, form, and color and began is career-long investigation into how figure and ground are perceived in nonrepresentational painting. He became interested in the way that painting engages with the architectural space that it inhabits; rather than attempting to simulate three-dimensional perspective in a composition, he instead considered the wall to be a kind of ‘ground’ and the painting itself a figure on it.
In Orange Green (1964), made the following decade when he was back in New York, he established the figure-ground relationship on the canvas itself through the careful balance of two areas of color: the truncated orange egg-shape is the figure and the bright green color that surrounds it functions as its background.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
When last we visited Kate Werble Gallery for one of sculptor Christopher Chiappa’s immersive exhibits, the place was covered wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with Fried Eggs, and that was a good time. For his fourth exhibition at the gallery, Chiappa has installed in its front and back rooms two collections of what, on first glance, appear to be brightly colored, painted wooden tables. On closer examination, however, the at once familiar table shapes of Chiappa’s sculptures transmute and metamorphose into increasingly whimsical and delightful forms as you progress through the galleries. It’s a hoot.
Continue reading Christopher Chiappa’s Compositions at Kate Werble Gallery