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Ellsworth Kelly
White Relief, 1950

Artwork Info

Artwork title
White Relief
Artist name
Ellsworth Kelly
Date created
1950
Classification
painting
Medium
oil on wood
Dimensions
39 1/2 in. × 27 5/8 in. × 1 7/8 in. (100.33 cm × 70.17 cm × 4.76 cm)
Date acquired
1999
Credit
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab
Copyright
© Ellsworth Kelly
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/99.357
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

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Is this artwork a painting or a sculpture?

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NARRATOR: In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly began adding relief elements on top of his formerly flat canvases. These muscular new works had slightly raised edges, overlapping surfaces, and stretchers of various thicknesses …  

 

GARY GARRELS: … which complicates the interplay of line and of surface and of shadow and shape and form. Hes introducing shadows as an active part of the work itself and our understanding, our relationship to that work.  

 

The paintings are really on a continuum with sculpture, in the way they occupy space and in our relationship to understanding them by our position either in front of them, to the side of them, or as we move around them.  

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