“I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and white—the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be”

—Ellsworth Kelly

A masterful fusion of painting and sculpture, Ellsworth Kelly’s Black Diagonal Relief, 2006 stands as a quiet yet commanding meditation on form, perception, and spatial presence. Comprising two joined oil-on-canvas panels—one matte black, one white—the work encapsulates the refined precision of Kelly’s mature visual language. Executed in the final decade of his life, it distills decades of formal experimentation into a single, minimalist composition. Despite its stark economy of means, Black Diagonal Relief is rich with tension and nuance, reflecting Kelly’s enduring ambition: to liberate form from illusion and allow it to operate freely within space.

This painting was part of Kelly’s 2006–2007 New Paintings exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York—his first solo presentation to concentrate exclusively on black and white. Included among six new oil paintings, Black Diagonal Relief exemplified a body of work that embraced the total removal of color as a means of heightening formal and spatial awareness. “When the concerns of color are removed,” explained the gallery’s press release, “the eye focuses more on subtleties of form… reduced to their formal essence, these new paintings fully reveal the artist’s compositional rigor.”ⁱ In her review for Art in America, Nancy Princenthal described the show as “all suave sophistication and smart lines… little differences ramify hugely, and the longer you spend with these paintings, the more mysterious they seem.”ⁱⁱ

Kelly’s career was defined by an unwavering focus on shape, color, and surface. He once summarized his artistic pursuit as follows: “I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself… and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.”ⁱⁱⁱ This notion of autonomy—form unanchored from representation—animates the present work. A curved black form slices diagonally across the white rectangular support, its upper edge describing a sweeping arc while the lower edge cuts sharply, almost surgically, across the field. The composition is both self-contained and expansive, poised between assertive structure and elusive ambiguity. Kelly’s shaped canvases often break the conventional frame, yet Black Diagonal Relief remains rectilinear in its overall dimensions. What it achieves instead is a powerful optical play: the black shape appears to press forward and recede simultaneously, carving through the white ground with an understated force. This subtle three-dimensionality—accentuated by the physical relief construction—creates an ambiguous relationship between figure and ground. The black shape does not merely sit on the canvas; it emerges from it, intruding upon and reshaping the space it inhabits.
 

“Each color begins and ends with its own panel. There is no form or ground in the painting: the whole painting is the form and the ground becomes the wall.”

—Ellsworth Kelly

The visual austerity of Black Diagonal Relief belies its emotional and conceptual depth. Executed in Kelly’s Spencertown studio—a vast, light-filled space adapted by architect Richard Gluckman after the artist relocated from New York City in 1970—the painting emerged from a period of reinvention. No longer constrained by urban studio limitations, Kelly embarked on a large-scale investigation into joined-panel painting. Beginning in the early 2000s, he increasingly paired shaped canvases with rectilinear supports, as in the present work, to explore formal tension, material contrast, and spatial activation. Kelly’s embrace of shaped and joined canvases positioned him both within and beyond the major post-war movements of his time. Though often grouped with artists like Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg, Kelly’s abstraction was singular in its rejection of metaphor and symbolism in favor of pure visual experience. “In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness,” he wrote.^iv “My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use.”^v His geometric forms—stripped of all associative content—are rooted in visual phenomena observed in the world: light streaming through a window, a shadow falling across a page, the curve of a leaf. These became, in his hands, the raw material for a radical new vocabulary of form.

“The space between the viewer and the work became the active area for viewing the work (rather than in easel painting where the viewer is drawn into the depicted space or, as with the Impressionists or Expressionists, drawn to the marks and gestures of the painting on the surface).”

—Ellsworth Kelly

Though profoundly modernist in their distillation, Kelly’s reliefs resonate with the ancient. His interest in sculptural projection dates to his years in postwar France, where encounters with Romanesque and Byzantine reliefs left a lasting impression. “In Paris in the late '40s, I started making my first reliefs… I wanted to do something coming out of the wall, almost like a collage… I liked antique reliefs, really old stuff… Roman and Greek reliefs.”^vi In Black Diagonal Relief, the shaped black panel projects from the white field like a fragment of architectural ornament stripped to its essence. The effect is not decorative but declarative: form as a presence in space, not a window into illusion.

“Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom.”

—Ellsworth Kelly

Critic Johanna Burton observed that Kelly’s shaped reliefs “don’t end at the edge… Rather than demarcating the shape and space of the work more clearly, [the cast shadow] works to utterly confuse what is being looked at.”^vii That ambiguity is central to the experience of Black Diagonal Relief. Despite its severe geometry, the work invites the viewer into an unfolding perceptual event, where distinctions between object and environment, shape and shadow, figure and field begin to blur. The physical projection of the black canvas transforms the painting into a sculptural object, one that does not simply represent space but occupies and defines it. This ambiguity also imbues the work with an unusual emotional register. The black surface—uniform, matte, and absorbing—offers a depth that is more contemplative than austere. In the absence of expressive brushwork or narrative, Black Diagonal Relief achieves a lyrical intensity through sheer restraint. “I’m interested in the mass and color, the black and white—the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be,” Kelly remarked.^viii Here, silence becomes presence, and stillness becomes force.

Black Diagonal Relief is not just an exercise in formal elegance; it is a culmination of a career-long investigation into how shape, surface, and perception interact. The painting challenges the viewer to see more by showing less—to slow down, to notice, to inhabit the space between image and object. In this sense, Kelly’s minimalism is not cold or clinical, but deeply human. His abstractions are distilled experiences of seeing, grounded in the everyday and elevated through artistic clarity. As Gottfried Boehm noted, Kelly’s radical shift came “when form emancipated itself from its customary support… so that it could from then on lead an independent existence in the visual world.”_ix Black Diagonal Relief embodies this independence. It does not merely sit on the wall—it asserts itself, quietly but insistently, as a thing in the world, asking the viewer to meet it not with interpretation, but with attention.

ⁱ Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, Ellsworth Kelly: New Paintings, Nov 11, 2006–Jan 27, 2007, exhibition text, online.
ⁱⁱ Nancy Princenthal, “New York - Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks,” Art in America, March 2007, p. 168.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ellsworth Kelly, quoted in Ellsworth Kelly: Recent Paintings and Sculptures, New York, 1979, p. 7.
^iv Ellsworth Kelly, Notes of 1969, reprinted in: Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley 1996, p. 93.
^v Ibid.
^vi Ellsworth Kelly, quoted in Gwyneth Paltrow, “Ellsworth Kelly,” Interview Magazine, September 24 2011, online.
^vii Johanna Burton, "Ellsworth Kelly: Changing Parameters,” Matthew Marks, Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal, New York, 2009, n.p.
^viii Ellsworth Kelly, quoted in 1964 interview with Henry Geldzahler; cited in: Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, New York, 1996, p. 11.
^ix Gottfried Boehm, “In-Between Spaces,” Ellsworth Kelly, Riehen/Basel, 2002, p. 3