SELECTED WORKS SELECTED BLACK BONE: ON ROBERT KELLY ROBERT KELLY BLACK ON BONE: SELECTED WORKS ROBERT KELLY BLACK ON BONE: SELECTED WORKS SOPHIA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY 11 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, W1K 4QB, UK www.sophiacontemporary.com ROBERT KELLY Robert Kelly (born 1956) is an American artist based in New York City. Kelly was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and studied at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (B.A. 1978). Kelly has traveled throughout the United States, Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Nepal. His work often incorporates unusual materials from his journeys, among them vintage posters and printed antique paper, obscured and layered in saturated pigments on a canvas faintly scored with irregular grids. Kelly’s paintings have been likened to palimpsests and his method described as one of building “meticulously on inhabited ground, layering materials, documents, and signs, covering them, wiping out their beauty, nearly, but allowing something of the labor and their languages to persist.” Robert Kelly’s influences include the De Stijl movement, Malevich and Mondrian and modernists like Bauhaus, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Philip Guston, Richard Diebenkorn, Kurt Schwitters, Blinky Palermo and Brazilian Neo-Concretists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. Kelly himself cites Hans Arp, Myron Stout, Tony Smith, Brancusi, Calder, Bill Traylor, Louise Bourgeois, and Ellsworth Kelly. His paintings have been acquired by public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Smith College Art Museum, Northampton MA; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutger’s University, NJ; Montgomery Museum of Fine Ars, Montgomery; The Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; and The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Robert Kelly’s works impress us with the ease, virtuosity, and persuasion in which the artist deals with seemingly polar plastic and artistic phenomena, resulting in an organic and multi-di- mensional creativity emerging at the artist’s will. Robert Kelly honours geometry, feeling it represents a visible assertion of human presence ROBERT KELLY, in the universe: ordered geometric elements are generated by the human mind and imagination. VIRTUOSO Abstract regular shapes are children of civilization: when creating them, the artist is on the same OF THE PALIMPSEST footing with Nature, being a creator just like her. The assertion of aesthetic value, importance, Alexandra Shatskikh and magnificence of geometric abstract art is an achievement of not such a distant past. Two titans of the twentieth century Modernism, Russian avant-gardist Kazimir Malevich and Dutch artist Piet Mondrian had to fight relentlessly for the recognition of this new artistic language. They paved the way for all subsequent generations of artists captivated by the unprecedented opportunities opened up by generalized compositions with or without subject that have overcome traditions of mimetic figurative art. Already from the very beginning – starting from the golden age of both great masters – it became apparent that abstract art constitutes a world of directions where some are exactly opposite to the others, as well as boundless alternatives enabling masters to express their individuality and talent. American Robert Kelly is a sophisticated artist who knows and loves the works of the visionaries, yet is well aware of their antagonism. Asserting his system of dynamic abstraction that he called Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich polemically denied the balanced Neo-plastic grids created by Piet Mondrian, while the latter believed that the un- shakeable harmony of the universe lies in the tran- Nocturne I, 1999 Oil/ Mixed Media on Board, 43 x 36 cm quillity of static and therefore perfect constructions. 6 7 Understanding such opposed standpoints, Robert Kelly In 1914-1915, another Russian avant-gardist, enters into a dialogue with the creations of both artists Vladimir Tatlin, the visionary of the Constructivist to achieve an amazing result: in his own works, he movement, created so-called selections of brings together the polarity of both abstract systems. materials, giving voice to trivial everyday materials that previously never pertained to art, such as In the works where he uses generalized geometric glass, wallpapers, brown paper, concrete, ropes, elements, the tone is set by large patterns of wire, or undyed wood. clear sonorous colour the artist puts into strong geometric figures: they give a feeling of continuity Kurt Schwitters, the German Dadaist, pursued this and stability, and their arrangement is elegant direction in his own way by organizing waste into with rectified and substantiated harmony; we can grandiose installations. definitely see the artist’s love for Neoplasticism and his dialogue with Piet Mondrian. Robert Kelly manifests his focused attention to materiality on quite a remarkable medium. He At the same time, the large and clearly delineated loves paper and it looks like paper loves him: it Kazimir Malevich, Black Square and Circle, 1920/21 shapes dominating his designs unmistakably does not let him go, wishing to find a place in every Pencil on paper, 19,5 x 31 cm correspond to Malevich’s monofigures, primarily work of the master. Collection of Vladimir Tsarenkov to the famous Suprematist Black Square with its hidden dynamics whose strain palpably breaks the The paper Kelly works with takes the form of regular nature of its square figure. used posters, stationary forms, and sheets from manuscripts, just to name a few. Here, Nonetheless, the dramatic difference in Kelly’s the American master with his usual artistic abstract works – despite all associative ties to the effortlessness appropriates another great tradition great traditions of geometric abstract visionaries – that has shaped contemporary art – the famous lies in the deliberate and even somewhat polemic readymades of Marcel Duchamp. denial of sterility, the estrangement from anything material that is so crucial to the works of Malev- Already a quick listing of the various traditions ich-the-mystic and Mondrian-the-theosophist. infusing Robert Kelly’s work brings the feeling of the wealth and complexity, which make his works The American painter greatly respects the so captivating. In his works, the artist brings metaphysical nature of pure abstraction yet is a together and blends the beautiful harmony of master of other equally powerful plastic systems geometric patterns whose silhouettes, in partic- of modern art. These systems were also induced by ular figures made of semi-circular and circular overwhelming shifts in art, which brought the new outlines (Mimesis series, 2010), impress with their civilizational era beginning in the twentieth century. perfection, steadiness of the hand, and unmatched clarity. This is achieved on a background of everyday The spiritual ideality of pure nonobjectivity would materials, such as paper strips or squares taken draw painting away from earthly matters, and from posters or old printed materials. some daring and talented artists found it bloodless, ethereal and excessively transcendent. Denying the The coexistence of eternal geometric shapes and Kazimir Malevich, Plate “Dynamic composition”, 1923 sublime sterility of strict abstract constructions, ephemeral evidence of everyday human reality and The State (former Imperial) Porcelain Manufactory they turned to purely material phenomena glorifying urban life builds up a vibrant contrast in small and Painting design: K.Malevich in their works the tangible flesh of the world and the large compositions, producing an acute effect on Painting execution: A. Kudriavtsev Porcelain, polychrome overglaze painting, D 23,7 cm material visualization of artistic ideas. the viewer’s perception. Collection of Vladimir Tsarenkov 8 9 However, Kelly goes even further: in addition to The ground below the horizon is formed by regular The decorative compositions of his Nocturnes, Robert Kelly is a master of material abstraction, using aged paper - its thin brittle sheets creating rectangles cut out from envelopes, stationary with their monumental grids of large rectangles of and that is not an oxymoron: he is able to combine a fold line paving the background with regular forms, letters, and printed media. The colours of local sonorous colours, echo Mondrian’s fragility and eternity, heaviness and lightness, the collage elements – he focuses on paper, treating it the earth structures its earthly nature, since it is the post-and-beam Neoplasticism, dating back to present and the timeless, tactile palpability and as the recipient of information. authentic colour of the original sheets: it is faded or ancient classical architecture on the one hand, and contemplative ideality, the regular rigor of geometry yellowed paper kept for decades or sometimes even to Malevich’s favoured Suprematist monofigures and the organic free-wheeling of painting, and The invention of papermaking and its industrial centuries that itself has accumulated historical on the other hand. the list of extremes found in his works can go on production have advanced civilizational processes, weight. Covering the painting surface with a and on. making it possible to accumulate and replicate in protective layer of acrylic lacquer, Kelly protects Amazing subtlety is found in the arranged written and printed texts information on discoveries,