Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance

A look at Ellsworth Kelly’s eight Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance collages and how they set the foundation for his career-long exploration of abstract, minimalist art

Revered for his iconic color field paintings, Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) is one of the most influential artists in American Abstraction. His body of work, encompassing paintings, sculptures, and prints, illustrates his unprecedented experiments with form and color. Less well known are his eight collages, known as Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance (1951), which led directly to some of the artist’s most iconic early works. Made from papier gomette, or sticky squares of colored paper used by French schoolchildren, these collages represent Kelly’s early exploration of non-compositional strategies. Created by using chance operations to place the gomette on grids, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance boldly anticipates the evolution of Kelly’s innovative methods. Alongside brilliant photographs that bring the reader into intimate contact with Kelly’s series of collages, a wide-ranging roundtable conversation with artist Jacqueline B. Humphries, art historian Hannah Higgins, and Kelly’s widower, the photographer Jack Shear, explores the origins of these groundbreaking works and their continued resonance today, bringing to life the story of his bold, experimental designs.

Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

Giampaolo Bianconi is associate curator of modern and contemporary art, and Caitlin Haskell is the Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art and director of Ray Johnson Collections and Research, both at the Art Institute of Chicago.