Ellsworth Kelly: New Paintings / Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957

Ellsworth Kelly: New Paintings / Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 documents an important moment in the career of Ellsworth Kelly, focusing on two interrelated facets of his work:

a series of new paintings and a major early architectural commission. In 1957, Kelly was commissioned to create a 65-foot-long wall sculpture for the Transportation Building at Penn Center in Philadelphia — at the time, his largest work and a significant early public work. The publication brings together visual documentation of this monumental sculpture alongside reproductions of recent shaped canvases and abstract paintings, highlighting Kelly’s ongoing exploration of form, color, and space. The sculpture project exemplifies Kelly’s interest in the relationship between artwork and architecture, treating the surface of the wall as an extension of sculptural form. The texts accompanying the images, including commentary by James Meyer, situate Kelly’s work within mid-century abstraction and consider how these early experiments in scale, geometry, and site-specificity anticipated later developments in his career. The result is a focused look at a pivotal moment when painting and sculpture intersected in Kelly’s practice, expanding the possibilities of both media.