Color Panels for a Large Wall

1978

Ellsworth Kelly

Painter, American, 1923 - 2015

Three rows of six horizontal, rectangular canvases, each painted a single, saturated color, hang in a widely spaced grid against a three-story gray stone wall in this photograph. Moving from our left to right, the canvases in the top row are carrot orange, pine green, royal blue, canary yellow, marigold orange, and azure blue. The middle row has panels in marine blue, amethyst purple, shamrock green, soot black, vivid red, and rust brown. The bottom row canvases are banana yellow, black, coral red, midnight blue, emerald green, and orchid purple. The smaller, rectangular stones in the wall behind the panels are also laid horizontally, and they vary from silvery white to smoke gray.
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Color Panels for a Large Wall was created by Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) in 1978 for the Central Trust Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was installed at the bank until 1992, when the building was renovated and the work was given to the Cincinnati Art Museum. The museum could not find a suitable wall for Color Panels, so they contacted the artist, and in 1996 Kelly gave the museum two paintings in exchange for the panels. The work (which represents the artist's return to color after a period of working in black and white) consists of 18 rectangular monochrome canvases, each painted a different hue—variations on each of the six primary and secondary colors, and two in black. Kelly chose and arranged the colors without any system. The original configuration consisted of two horizontal rows of nine panels on the bank's 140-foot wall. For the National Gallery of Art, the artist reconfigured the work by the artist into a grid of three rows of six panels each. Kelly prefers the Gallery’s installation of the work to the original.

Color Panels for a Large Wall was an opportunity for Kelly to explore on a large scale his long-held preoccupation with multipanel, multicolor paintings and the space in which his work is installed. In fact, two earlier works by Kelly make reference to a "large wall": Color Panels for a Large Wall from 1951, and Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957, both in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Sculpture for a Large Wall was originally created for the lobby of the Transportation Building in Philadelphia's Penn Plaza.)

Color Panels for a Large Wall is able to successfully occupy or "hold" the monumental three-story wall while remaining light in appearance because it incorporates elements typical of Kelly’s work, including precise balances of shape, space, and color. Also representative of Kelly's approach is his use of multiple panels whose relationship to the wall replaces the conventional figure-ground relationships found within paintings composed of a single canvas. In this way, Kelly's work is integrated into the space of the installation—unlike most conventional framed paintings, which are understood to be self-contained and distinct from the wall.

With this installation, the Gallery enlivens the public atrium space of the East Building with a work that dates—by chance—from the year the building opened.

On View

NGA, East Building, EG-100, S


Artwork overview

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Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Commissioned 1978 by the Central Trust Company, Cincinnati, and installed 1979; gift 1992 to the Cincinnati Art Museum; de-accessioned 1996 and returned to the artist; purchased 30 September 2005 by NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1979

  • [touring exhibition of American art], Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hayward Gallery, London, 1979-1980.

1980

  • [exhibition], Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1980.

Bibliography

2008

  • Temkin, Ann. Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today. Exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008: 23, fig. 17.

2012

  • Mays, Randy. "Second Glance: East Wing." Washington Post Magazine 135, no. 90 (March 4, 2012): 26, color repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20197758


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