Ellsworth Kelly is perhaps best known for his colorful, hard-edged minimal paintings. However, he was very interested in the overlap between painting and sculpture. Over his lifetime he produced 140 minimal sculptures inspired by prolonged observations of nature. He would distill these observations and sensations to simple lines, planes and forms. Kelly developed his pieces by exploring a series of ideas using various media. He would often start with a drawing that would lead to a print and end up as a sculpture. His sculptures are intended to be taken in at a single glance—the smooth flat surfaces make it difficult to differentiate the foreground from the background.
In the 1980s when Curve XXIV, the piece shown here, was made, Kelly was devoting as much time to his sculptures as he was to his painting. During this period he produced over 60% of his sculptures. This wall-mounted relief is a simple fan shape of weathered steel measuring approximately 6’ x 19’, which some suggest mimics a gingko leak in autumn. The work is on display near the entrance of the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. A quote from Kelly on the title plate simply reads, “I am not interested in the texture of the rock, but in its shadow.” An intriguing and unintended aspect of this work is the rust stain right below it, which developed due to its geometry—a shadow of a shadow.