Ellsworth Kelly

Blum Helman Gallery, New York
James Younger, Houston
Blum Helman Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1994

New York, Blum Helman Gallery, Ellsworth Kelly: New Paintings, December 1982 - January 1983, illustrated in color on the invitation for the exhibition (installation shot)
Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, The Private Eye: Selected Works from Collections of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts, July - August 1989 

Carter Ratcliff, "Ellsworth Kelly: "Curves" and "Panels"," Artstudio: Spécial Ellsworth Kelly, 24, Spring 1992, pp. 112-131, p. 122, illustrated in color (installation shot Spencertown studio 1982)
Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (and travelling), Ellsworth Kelly: a Retrospective, 1996, p. 58, fig. 2, illustrated in color (installation shot Spencertown studio 1982)

This painting is in excellent condition. For further information, a condition report has been prepared by Terrence Mahon, Painting Conservator, New York City Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 to receive this report. The canvs is framed in a brushed metal frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Curve embodies Kelly's signature style. Conflating the categories of painting, sculpture, and relief, Kelly achieves a powerful unified visual entity. Kelly conceived his shaped canvases as immediate, unmediated effects which would recreate a vivid and graphically stimulating reference of the viewer's own immediate and unmediated visual experience of the physical world. However, all experience, whether physical or spiritual, is certainly mediated and becomes subjective. Even when Kelly's geometric abstractions were first exhibited in 1959, they were already perceived as having "hard, crisp edges [that] commanded the eye to feel them as the hand would feel soft flesh." (E. C. Goosen, Sixteen Americans, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1959, p. 31)

One of the most intriguing characteristics of Kelly's oeuvre, considering his choice of supports, is the lesser importance he places on the exterior shape of his paintings. "I'm not interested in edges," he asserts. "I'm interested in the mass of color, the black and the white. The edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be... it is impossible to separate the edges from the mass and color in my work."  (an interview with Henry Geldzahler in Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., Gallery of Modern Art, Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, 1963)  For Kelly, who is adverse to any color psychology, expansive form is controlled, in a dramatic abstract way, by distilling color to its very essence. Although his approach to color may indicate indifference to its formal qualities, there exists a grand tradition—one he was surely acquainted with—for the use of black in modern painting. Mondrian regarded his intersecting blacks as morally expressive. And Barnett Newman, through the masterly development of his surfaces, found maximum sensuousness within the rectangle of his color field. Conversely, for Kelly, color is strictly surface and form. Only its immediacy and its unique ability for activating our consciousness are regarded as truly vital.