Narrator: Many of the works in this gallery belong to a style known as hard-edge painting. Curator Smooth Nzewi:
Curator, Smooth Nzewi: The term really implies what you see when you're looking at the work: these crisp edges where one color stops and the other one begins, flat colors, monochromatic, geometric.
Narrator: Ellsworth Kelly was one of the artists moving away from gestural painting to this new, more controlled style.
Smooth Nzewi: Chatham VI: Red Blue—it's made up of two separate canvases, and they're joined together to form this upside-down L. Kelly didn't think of himself as just making abstract invention out of thin air. He was always working from observing the world around him. Chatham VI was actually inspired by a window in his home in upstate New York.
He worked with single colors, meaning that they're actually very layered before they're applied on the surface of a canvas, and hence, you have this very smooth finish.
Artist, Ellsworth Kelly: All my colors are mixed in depth in order to paint. I put white in the colors. I want to get it as quiet as possible because I didn't want your eye to concentrate on the surface. With my pictures, I felt like I'm using [the] space between the picture and the viewer to concentrate on, so I don't want marks. It's a big mark. It's a whole.
Smooth Nzewi: For him, art was all about the pure experience of looking. He thought of his painting as being between the viewer and the work as a silent encounter—no storytelling, no complex magic to unpack, just an encounter with you, the color, the shape.