Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work changed the relationship between a painting and the space around it. He drew much of his vocabulary from things he encountered in daily life: a window frame, a shadow on a wall, the curve of a leaf. Isolated from their surroundings, these forms became sharply defined fields of color, joined panels, and freestanding sculptures. A shape could occupy an entire canvas or determine its outline, bringing the wall around it into the composition.

Born in Newburgh, New York, and raised in northern New Jersey, Kelly studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before joining the U.S. Army in 1943. He served in a camouflage unit during World War II and afterward studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1948, he went to France on the G.I. Bill and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The six years he spent in France were formative. In Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1949), the proportions of a museum window became the basis for a painted relief. The work established a method Kelly would return to throughout his career, taking a form he had observed and giving it an independent presence.

Kelly returned to New York in 1954 and had his first American solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956. The Museum of Modern Art included him in Sixteen Americans in 1959. At a moment when Abstract Expressionism dominated American painting, Kelly developed an approach in which the placement of an edge or the meeting of two colors could carry the force of a brushstroke. He continued to work from observation alongside his abstractions. In his plant drawings, a few lines register the weight of a stem or the angle at which a leaf turns. The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted an exhibition to these drawings in 2012.

Kelly brought color, sculpture, and architecture together in Austin, the only building he designed. Completed posthumously in 2018, the stone building is part of the permanent collection of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. It houses a redwood sculpture and fourteen black-and-white stone panels. Colored glass windows cast changing patterns of light across the interior, making the experience of color dependent on the time of day and the position of the viewer.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organized a major retrospective in 1996. A centennial survey opened at Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, in 2023, and a broad survey developed with Glenstone followed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2024.

Kelly’s work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Kröller-Müller Museum. In Kansas City, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art holds White Black (1960), a large oil painting in which a single curving edge gives both colors a distinct presence.