Ellsworth Kelly : portrait drawings / edited by Kevin Salatino, with Emily Vokt Ziemba ; essays by Jordan Carter, Richard Meyer, and Susan Tallman, and an interview with Jack Shear.
Edition:
First edition.
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Copyright Date:
℗♭2023
Description:
188 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), portraits ; 26 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index. Catalog of exhibition with the same name held at Art Institute of Chicago, from July 1 to October 23, 2023.
Contents:
Works in the Exhibition. Kevin Salatino, Emily Vokt Ziemba, and Mark Pascale -- Stilled Life and Likeness: Ellsworth Kelly and the History of Portraiture / Susan Tallman -- Drawing Near: Ellsworth Kelly's Private Portraits / Richard Meyer -- Staging Ellsworth Kelly(s): Camouflage, Multiplicity, and Negation in Kelly's Self-Representations / Jordan Carter -- I'll Make You One: An Interview with Jack Shear / Kevin Salatino, Emily Vokt Ziemba, and Mark Pascale -- Works in the Exhibition.
Summary:
Featuring one hundred figurative works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), this volume shows a new side of an artist best known for abstraction. These informal depictions of friends and expressive self-portraits--all rarely or never previously displayed or published--span the entirety of Kelly's career, from the mid-1940s to the early 2000s. Throughout his life, Kelly made portraits as a means of keeping his hand adept at drawing, which provided a place to test his ideas, refine his bold use of lines, and interrogate the space between naturalism and abstraction. These works also capture his social milieu, which intersected with other creative circles and the queer community. He painstakingly recorded how his own appearance changed over time, and once described some of these sketches by saying, "I use myself in order to draw." The accompanying critical essays unpack the ways in which such intimate efforts were fundamental to Kelly's practice and situate this important aspect of his work within the artist's wider oeuvre.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.