Arts & Entertainment

Ellsworth Kelly art exhibited at MFAH 

By Uruj Perwaiz
The Daily Cougar

Among the basic colors introduced to us as children were red, green and blue. Ellsworth Kelly combined these basic colors and incorporated them into his art. His exhibition, appropriately titled Red Green Blue, is on display through July 27 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Kelly, a New York native, was born in the early 1920s. He studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then left the United States for Europe. Most of his time was spent in Paris enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but Kelly barely attended class, instead spending his time with Paris artists around town. 

Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, he traveled to Spain, Italy and other European nations, eventually returning to the United States along with his art. 

Since then, it has been displayed at dozens of galleries across the nation, and Kelly has gained a strong reputation as an essential American artist of abstract works from the postwar period.

The exhibit displays 14 major paintings and 36 related drawings, collages and photographs. It includes a massive collection of paintings that seem simple, almost primitive, with his three basic colors being swiped across the rectangular canvases.

The most renowned of Kellyis masterpieces are the group of large-scale paintings, which are images of red, green and blue symmetrical shapes. Unfortunately, the entire exhibit is painting after painting of the three colors splashed up against each other, and the redundancy can create frustration. Kelly, almost 80, participated in planning the MFAH exhibition.

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