Abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly dies twentieth century – ElTiempo.com

Ellsworth Kelly, one of the leading abstract painters of the twentieth century and recognized by their color combinations in geometric arrangement, died Dec. 27 at age 92.

The news released its curator, Matthew Marks, owner of the gallery of the same name, and who also reported that a nice Christmas spent with family and friends artists and working to the end.

The painter, sculptor and engraver, born 1923 in New York. He began his career after World War II and became famous for a very personal style of experimentation with colors, combining very bright colors on neutral backgrounds.

After studying art Brooklyn (New York) and Boston (Massachusetts), Kelly traveled to Paris at the end of the decade of the 40s the artist had known the city while serving in the Army, together with the allied troops during the war. On that trip Kelly extended his artistic education, both formal studies at the School of Fine Arts, and personal visits to museums and friendship with other artists, which was established a creative personality from the natural influence first European abstract movement in vogue.

After returning to America in 1954, he embarked on a search for his personal style, away from the orthodoxies and open to all possibilities it had abstraction. Simplicity and defining its forms and vibrant colors and planes did eventually one of the greatest exponents of minimalist painting and the current “Color Field” originated in New York in the middle of the last century and derived from Expressionism Abstract and European modernism.

Fond bird watching since childhood, always said that hobby helped to train your eye regarding colors and develop their perception of simplicity of natural forms. “I think you could put your mind and just look with your eyes, and in the end everything becomes abstract”, he said in an interview in 1991. Kelly said he did not seek inspiration outside himself.

Many of his paintings from the decades of the 50s and 60s consisted solely of a slick geometric shape and a vivid color on a neutral background, which made him one of the leading exponents of the aesthetics of simplicity minimalist, opposed the dominant abstract expressionism before. He was also one of the first artists to experiment with the format works, breaking the traditional structures and prolonging them in all dimensions.

In 1996 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum Guggenheim of New York, which also was taken the following year the Museum of Fine Arts Los Angeles. Although best known for his painting,

Ellsworth Kelley was also an important sculptor. In 2013, one of his 1983 sculpture, consisting of a steel structure cut in honor of the Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida, sold for $ 600,000 at an auction in London.