The Nicola Del Roscio Foundation presents, from Thursday 13 April 2023 to Tuesday 11 July 2023, a new exhibition project dedicated to a fundamental figure in the history of contemporary art, the American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923, Newburgh, NY – 2015, Spencertown , NY). “Ellsworth Kelly: Line, Form, Color”, curated by Jack Shear, director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, and co-curated by Peter Benson Miller, is the only Italian stage of the exhibition tour organized by the Ellsworth Kelly Studio of Spencertown, New York, on the occasion of the centenary of the artist's birth, to celebrate his work and the important cultural heritage handed down to the new generations.

The exhibition project brings together a rich selection of drawings taken from the famous series dedicated to the floral universe and monochromatic panels, underlining "the decisive impact that these small adjustments" have had on Kelly's work, through the use of different media.

A pioneer of abstraction, Ellsworth Kelly is known for his rigorous stroke that defines lines, colors and shapes within drawings, paintings and sculptures. He reduces painting to its essence, eliminating gesture and detail, to evoke the power of visual literalness, often merging painting and sculpture to explore the ambiguities between foreground and background, between smooth and raised surfaces. In parallel with his non-figurative paintings, sculptures and prints, Kelly repeatedly focused on botanical motifs reproduced in series, on paper. The plant studies featured in the exhibition – ranging from 1949 to 2010 – show his rigorous simplification of natural forms characterized by contour drawings, in which the shapes of objects are defined entirely by line. The fascination for this kind of motifs was born in Kelly between 1948 and 1954, when he lived in Paris, where he encountered the sinuous lines that recalled the sensuality of nature present in the works of Henri Matisse and Hans Arp. The serial repetition of the same motifs reveals how Kelly made subtle changes between drawings, providing insights into his artistic process.