Shape, Ground, Shadow The Photographs Of Ellsworth Kelly

Exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, 15 October 2023 - 14 January 2024

From the late 1940s onwards, Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) created a body of abstract art that marked his era, drawing inspiration from the many visual phenomena he perceived around him. Much less well known, his photographs, extraordinary works of art, provide an insight into how the artist recorded shapes, shadows and other visual phenomena that resonated in his work in other media over seven decades.

This book is the catalogue of the first exhibition devoted solely to the photographs of Ellsworth Kelly. It brings together 60 photographs, expressing the way in which the artist brilliantly transcribed his environment in art that, although abstract, still resonated with his subjective experiences of the real, everyday world.