Plant Drawings

New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2017. Second edition. Hardcover, [72]pp., 11.5 x 9.5 inches.

Very Good. Faint fading to jacket and minor creasing along top edge. 

Though best known as a painter of scrupulous hard-edge abstractions, Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) saw drawing plants as playing a central role in his art. This catalogue features over thirty drawings made between 1949 and 2008. Kelly drew them from life, sometimes barely lifting the pencil as he translated each plant’s contours to paper. Despite the immediacy of their execution, the drawings share a great deal with his paintings and sculptures — not only in their focus on direct visual impressions but also in their fascination with the effects of negative space and overlapping planes.