Berkshire Botanical Garden announces a season-long exhibition featuring the plant lithographs of artist Ellsworth Kelly beginning Sunday, May 6 in the Garden’s Leonhardt Galleries, Stockbridge. Kelly lived and worked in Columbia County, New York for nearly 50 years and was deeply drawn to the area’s natural beauty. The exhibition, assembled from Kelly’s iconic series, Suite of Plant Lithographs, is on loan from the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation through October 8.
Kelly began making lithographs in Paris in 1964, and over the next few years created a seminal body of work as both an homage to and bold departure from Matisse’s evocative line drawings. Throughout his seven-decade career, Kelly’s plant drawings were rendered in a variety of mediums, including watercolor and ink washes, but he preferred graphite pencil and the use of line only to express the plants’ intrinsic qualities. Carter Foster, considered an authority on the life and work of Ellsworth Kelly describes Kelly’s creative process:
For the series of 1964-66 lithographs that are the subject of this exhibition, he mostly chose from a range of pencil studies he’d recently made, which he then reworked on transfer paper in order to create the print portfolio. He was therefore redrawing–from his own drawing–a specimen he’d first drawn from life. In other cases, he drew while directly observing the plant, right on the transfer paper used to make the lithograph. In another case–Catalpa Leaf–he drew the form from memory. This series, taken as a whole, has a uniformity provided by the consistent size and color of the paper and by the harmonious, roughly centered placement of the forms on each sheet, even though there were several modes of generating the form: observation from life, copying, and memory. It is quite a different act to re-draw one’s own drawing or to draw from memory than to draw from life, from the object itself. In the first case, for example, one could change–even perfect–what may not have been fully satisfactory the first time.
Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Lithographs is the first major exhibition at the Garden’s Leonhardt Galleries which are located in its newly restored and renovated c. 1800s Center House. “Our objective in planning the galleries was to create unique spaces for artists who truly find their inspiration in the natural world,” said the Garden’s Executive Director, Mike Beck. “This collection of work exemplifies an extraordinary artist who throughout his career consistently returned to nature as a primary subject. We look forward to a season of sharing this collection with the Berkshire community and beyond.” The exhibit will remain on display through October 8. Gallery hours are daily, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Dorothea Leonhardt Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas, Inc.
The opening of Kelly’s exhibition on May 6 coincides with the Garden’s 84th annual Roy Boutard Day, a celebration steeped in history and tradition. Admission to the Garden is free all day.
Berkshire Botanical Garden is located at 5 West Stockbridge Road in Stockbridge. For more information visit http://berkshirebotanical.org or call 413 298-3926.
ELLSWORTH KELLY Cyclamen V 1964-65 Lithograph on Rives BFK paper 35 5/8 x 24 1/4 inches (90.5 x 61.6 cm) Edition of 75 © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Maeght Éditeur
