While living and working in Paris, from 1948 to 1954, Kelly developed an abstract vocabulary of line, form, and color and began his career-long investigation into how figure and ground are perceived in nonrepresentational painting. He became interested in the way that painting engages with the architectural space it inhabits; rather than attempting to simulate three-dimensional perspective in a composition, he instead considered the wall a kind of “ground,” the painting itself a “figure” on it. In Orange Green, made the following decade, when he was back in New York, he established the figure-ground relationship on the canvas itself through the careful balance of two areas of color: the truncated orange egg-shape is the figure and the bright green color that surrounds it functions as its background.
Gallery label from Studio Visit: Selected Gifts from Agnes Gund, 2018
