Ellsworth Kelly at the FLV: Repetition, Chance and Abstraction
In its most recent Ellsworth Kelly. Shapes and Colors, 1949-2015 the Fondation Louis Vuitton – in celebration of the centennial of the pioneering artist’s birth - offers a broad overview of Kelly’s work, known for its ability to merge the boundaries between painting and sculpture while emphasising the shape and surface of the canvas. In addition to chronicling the ways in which the artist further shaped the development of Minimalism and Colour Field painting throughout the six decades of his prolific career, the exhibition also highlights how his work is punctuated by three central themes: repetition, chance, and abstraction, each contributing to his exploration of perception and form.
Repetition plays a critical role in Kelly’s work, reinforcing the meditative and architectural quality of his compositions. Many of his pieces consist of single shapes, like rectangles or curves, repeated with variations in colour and scale. His series Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I (1951) features squares of every colour arranged with the almost arbitrary fashion slot machine outcomes click into position, highlighting the interplay between order and randomness. This work shows how repeated shapes can create both a sense of rhythm and visual harmony, allowing the viewer to perceive subtle differences in hue and form through direct juxtaposition.
Influenced by his time in Paris after World War II, where he encountered the works of artists such as Jean Arp and Henri Matisse, Kelly adopted the notion that repeating simple forms could bring about an aesthetic experience detached from narrative or symbolic representation. In pieces like Red Blue Green (1963) Kelly explores the visual impact of repeated primary colours and simple shapes, challenging viewers to engage with pure form. For Kelly repetition was a way to engage viewers in a dialogue with the shape and colour itself, inviting them to perceive each form as a unique yet interrelated entity within the whole.
Chance is - alongside repetition - another crucial element that can be seen in Kelly’s work, particularly in the placement of color and form. Rather than carefully designing each composition from the outset, the artist often used random methods to determine the arrangement of shapes. In Colors for a Large Wall (1951) he selected colours for 64 square panels based on chance, allowing them to form an abstract mosaic that contrasts order and spontaneity. This practice aligns with the Dadaist and Surrealist traditions, particularly the work of Jean Arp, who used chance as a way to break away from conscious control in the creative process. By embracing randomness, Kelly found a way to create compositions that felt spontaneous and organic, while maintaining a structured basis at their core.
The use of chance also allowed Kelly to detach his work from any subjective interpretation, connecting it instead with natural processes and phenomena. By eliminating overt intention from his works, Kelly encouraged viewers to respond directly to its visual qualities rather than interpreting it as a symbol or story. This openness to interpretation reflects Kelly’s belief in the active role of the viewer in the completion of the work, where each person’s experience is unique.
Kelly’s approach, deeply rooted in abstraction, strips things down to their most essential shapes. Unlike others who therein take an interest in exploring emotional and philosophical aspects, his work remains resolutely external, taking cues from real-world objects and transforming them into pared-down forms. The artist’s study of shadows, plant shapes, and architectural structures reveals how he used the natural world as a basis for abstraction. This approach is evident in pieces like Leaf (1951) and White Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflection (1969), where simple lines and curves indirectly yet unmistakably evoke natural or architectural structures. Abstraction, for Kelly, was a path toward what he may have seen as a reality of painting where art exists as an object rather than a depiction of something else. His use of monochromatic panels and hard edges underscores this idea, as seen in his Black and White series. By focusing on shape, line, and colour, Kelly invites viewers to consider the canvas as an independent, self-contained entity. His work distills reality to basic forms, creating anonymous shapes, which lack any reference to a specific subject yet retain a universal resonance.
Kelly's embrace of repetition and chance and his pursuit of pure form had a profound influence on Minimalism and conceptual art. His emphasis on viewer experience and the physical presence of his works influenced site-specific art and installation, with later artists incorporating architectural spaces into their works in ways that echoed Kelly’s interest in shape and space. Today, Kelly’s work continues to resonate for its powerful simplicity, rooted in the artist’s approach to abstraction and minimalist ideals transforming modern art’s understanding of space, shape and colour and everyday objects into something extraordinary.