A pioneer of Hard-edge painting, Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) is best known for his striking canvases in monochromatic or flatly painted, primary colors that build upon the legacies of abstraction and Minimalism to explore shape, color, and form. Often rendered in irregularly shaped formats or in multiple panels, Kelly’s paintings expanded the definition and boundaries of painting in postwar and contemporary art.

Kelly first joined two canvas panels in his 1949 work, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, but his two-panel paintings gained momentum in his work in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, and Kelly returned to this practice with a sustained interest in the late 1980s, when he began combining curved and straight-edged panels. By joining multiple panels in his paintings, Kelly challenged the distinction between the historically separate categories of painting, sculpture, and relief, creating striking, geometric constructions.

As a source of inspiration for his work, the artist recalled childhood memories of cutting shapes of colored paper to make a collage. Building upon the late, colorful cutouts of Henri Matisse, the shapes and negative space both become important parts of the composition of Untitled (Red and Yellow). Two distinct panels – one a triangular form, teetering on a conventional triangle, yet disrupted by an elegant curvature on one of its sides, and the second a traditional square – delicately touch one another. With these conjoined red and yellow canvases in vivid color, Untitled (Red and Yellow) defies the traditional two-dimensional plane by elevating color and form into the sculptural realm. Kelly rejects the traditional confines of a framed picture, allowing the work to interact with the negative space presented by the juxtaposing wall.