From Thursday, April 13, 2023, to Tuesday, July 11, 2023, the Nicola Del Roscio Foundation presents a new exhibition dedicated to a key figure in the history of contemporary art, American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923, Newburgh, NY – 2015, Spencertown, NY). “Ellsworth Kelly: Line, Form, Color,” curated by Jack Shear, director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, and co-curated by Peter Benson Miller and Nicola Del Roscio, is the only Italian stop on the exhibition tour organized by the Ellsworth Kelly Studio in Spencertown, New York, to mark the centennial of the artist’s birth and celebrate his work and the important cultural legacy he has passed on to new generations.

The exhibition project brings together a rich selection of drawings from Kelly’s famous series dedicated to the floral universe and monochrome panels, underlining “the decisive impact that such small adjustments” had on Kelly’s work, through the use of different media.

A pioneer of abstraction, Ellsworth Kelly is known for his rigorous, defining lines, colors, and shapes within drawings, paintings, and sculptures. He strips painting to its essence, eliminating gesture and detail, to evoke the power of visual literality, often merging painting and sculpture to explore the ambiguities between foreground and background, between smooth and textured surfaces. Alongside his paintings, sculptures, and non-figurative prints, Kelly repeatedly focused on botanical motifs serially reproduced on paper. The plant studies featured in the exhibition—dating from 1949 to 2010—display his rigorous simplification of natural forms characterized by outline drawings, in which the shapes of objects are defined entirely by line. Kelly’s fascination with these types of motifs developed between 1948 and 1954, while living in Paris, where he encountered the sinuous lines that recalled the sensuality of nature found in the works of Henri Matisse and Hans Arp. The serial repetition of the same motifs reveals how Kelly made subtle changes from one drawing to the next, providing insights into his artistic process.