Qatar Museums (QM) will present “Ellsworth Kelly at 100” this October, a major survey exhibition commemorating the late artist’s seven-decade career and the first retrospective of his work in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (Menasa) region.
Organised by Glenstone Museum (Maryland, US), the exhibition marks what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday in 2023 and is one of the largest retrospectives of Kelly’s work in the 21st century.
The presentation will be on view at M7 from October 31 to February 2025.
Kelly (1923–2015) is regarded as one of the most significant American painters and sculptors.
Throughout his career, he drew inspiration from nature and the world around him to create a singular style that shaped American abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The comprehensive presentation will chart the artist’s lifelong exploration of the relationship between form, colour, line, and space through key works drawn from pivotal periods in his career.
Works on view will span the wide range of media in which the artist worked, from painting and sculpture to works on paper, collage, and photography.
Highlights include formative early creations such as *Painting for a White Wall (1952), a groundbreaking work composed of joined monochromatic panels, and *Painting in Three Panels (1956), a key example of Kelly’s engagement with architecture.
These early works will be on view alongside examples from the now canonical *Chatham and *Spectrum series.
A selection of the plant drawings that Kelly created throughout his career will feature prominently, alongside a selection of rarely exhibited photographs.
Also featured will be *Yellow Curve (1990), the first work in Kelly’s series of large-scale, floor-based paintings, which will be displayed in a custom-designed space.
The installation, which encompasses more than 600sq feet of floor space, is emblematic of the artist’s examination of the relationship between colour and architecture.
In a press statement, M7 director Maha Ghanim al-Sulaiti said: “By refining his craft over the course of seventy years, Ellsworth Kelly showed how paying close attention to the seemingly simplest things can yield marvellous insights.”
“Our mission with ‘Ellsworth Kelly at 100’ at M7 is to spark the same kind of excitement and curiosity in our visitors that guided him over the course of his career,” she said.
“At Glenstone Museum, we present art that fundamentally alters the ways we see the world,” said Glenstone director and co-founder Emily Wei Rales. “Few artists have done so with as much grace and elegance as Ellsworth Kelly, and it is an honour to collaborate with the QM to introduce this groundbreaking artist’s work to the Gulf region.”
The exhibition will feature nearly 70 works drawn from Glenstone’s collection and those of major international museum lenders, including Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Foundation Louis Vuitton, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Centre, and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
Major works have also generously been made available from the Ellsworth Kelly Studio and private collections.
“Ellsworth Kelly at 100” first debuted at Glenstone on May 4 last year, and then travelled to Paris as “Ellsworth Kelly. Shapes and Colours, 1949-2015”, which is currently on view at the Foundation Louis Vuitton through September 9.
The presentation of “Ellsworth Kelly at 100” in Doha is a legacy project of the Qatar-USA 2021 Year of Culture, a year-long programme of collaborations between institutions across both countries.
Ellsworth Kelly's *Chatham V Red Blue (1971).
Highlights include formative early paintings such as *Painting for a White Wall (1952).
The artist's *Yellow Curve (1990) will be on display at the exhibition.
