Ellsworth Kelly New York State Award Gallery Poster. Geometric shapes with red yellow and blue. Bottom says New York State Award, 1967 - New York State Council on the Arts. 

Condition: Few spots along border. 

Overall Size: 48 x 34 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 43 3/4 x 30 1/2 in. 

#8080  . 

Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) American/France. Kelly is known for minimalist painting and sculpture. 

Minimalist painter and sculptor, Ellsworth Kelly explains, "By removing the content from my work I shifted the visual reality of painting to include the space around it." Kelly was born May 31, 1923 in Newburgh, New York.  He studied at Pratt Institute* Brooklyn, from 1941 to 1943.  After military service from 1943 to 1945, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1946 to 1947.

Kelly studied art in Paris from 1948 to 1954, when post-war Paris was the home of European Abstraction and the avant-garde. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the G.I. Bill, although he attended classes infrequently.  In France, he discovered Romanesque art and architecture and Byzantine art. He was also introduced to Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism, which led him to experiment with automatic drawing and geometric abstraction.

His first solo show in New York was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956, and three years later he was included in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  In 1958, he also began to make freestanding sculptures. He moved out of Manhattan in 1970, set up a studio in Chatham, and a home in nearby Spencertown, New York.

Kelly's first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1973.  The following year, Kelly began an ongoing series of totemic sculptures in steel and aluminum.  He traveled throughout Spain, Italy, and France in 1977, when his work was included in Documenta in Kassel.

He has executed many public commissions, including a mural for UNESCO in Paris in 1969, sculpture for the city of Barcelona in 1978, and a memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1993.

Kelly's extensive work has been recognized in numerous retrospective exhibitions, including a sculpture exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982; an exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada from 198788; and a career retrospective in 1996 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Kelly lives in Spencertown, New York.

Few spots along border.