Matthew Marks Gallery

Ellsworth Kelly: Outside In introduces the artist’s latest body of work in meticulous color. These eleven paintings and five sculptures advance Kelly’s nearly seven-decade exploration of color and form, further developing key themes while breaking new ground.

The book’s introductory essay, by art historian Briony Fer, provides insight into Kelly’s perpetual movement between inside and outside, present and past, two dimensions and three. Of his multi-panel works, she writes, “The ground of painting is not only doubled in relation to the wall but has also become incredibly mobile, animated by all the splitting and fracturing, refusing to be still.”

This same interplay can be seen in a series of wall-mounted sculptures, the first Kelly has made in color. As Fer explains, “It is the sheerly beautiful incision of negative space into each of them — the exquisite point where the white wall penetrates the very center of the work and partially cuts it in two — that is as much a part of the work as the color positives.”