Blue Panel

Ellsworth Kelly's "Blue Panel" (1989/99) is an acrylic on fiberglass and plywood monochrome panel in blue, completing a series of single-color panels in the primary colors plus black and white. Blue, for Kelly, may have carried associations with the sky, the sea, or the spiritual qualities that Wassily Kandinsky and other abstract pioneers attributed to the color. But as always with Kelly, the color is not a symbol but a presence: the blue panel simply is blue, and the experience of that blueness is the entire content of the work. The fiberglass and plywood support gives the panel a solid, physical presence. The paint is applied in a smooth, even coat, the surface uninflected by any trace of the artist's gesture. The panel reads as both a painting and an object, a flat surface of color that is also a thing in the world. This blue panel, like its companions in the series, is the product of a lifetime of investigation into the nature of visual experience, a distillation of Kelly's art to its most essential element: a color, a surface, a presence.

Kelly's blue panel, like all his monochrome works, invites a phenomenological engagement with color that has been central to the experience of abstract art since the mid-20th century.

Blue, in its purest form, fills this panel with a presence that is both calm and intense, the culmination of Kelly's lifelong meditation on the power of a single color to transform the experience of looking.