Ellsworth Kelly at 100

Exhibition

Location
M7
Msheireb Downtown
Abdullah Bin Thani St, Doha, Qatar
E. contact@m7.org.qa

This is the American artist’s first-ever retrospective in the Middle East. Organised by Glenstone Museum in Maryland, US, the Doha presentation on view at M7 includes more than 70 works that span the entirety of Ellsworth Kelly’s career, ranging from his early days as a burgeoning artist in post-war Paris, through his final years as an icon of Modern art.

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The comprehensive presentation — which includes rarely seen works — charts the artist’s lifelong exploration of the relationship between form, colour, line, and space. Among the highlights are early foundational works such as Painting for a White Wall (1952) and Painting in Three Panels (1956) in which Kelly pares painting down to its simplest form and engages the surrounding architecture. Also included is Yellow Curve (1990), his first floor-based painting, which exemplifies the artist’s preoccupation with blurring the distinction between painting, sculpture and installation.

Ellsworth Kelly at 100 also features work from the seminal Chatham Series (1971), drawings and works on paper from the late 1940s to the early 2000s, and a selection of the artist’s lesser-known photographs (1950-1982).

The exhibition celebrates what would have been Kelly’s 100th birthday (in 2023) and introduces the MENASA region to the artist’s work, which has profoundly influenced modern and contemporary art, design and aesthetics.