Endless Possibilities: Geometric Abstraction
The UBS Lounge at Art Basel in Basel 2025 features works in the UBS Art Collection by international artists who engage with geometric abstraction.
Painter, printmaker and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly is associated with Hard-edge painting, an approach to abstract painting that became widespread in the 1960s and is characterized by areas of flat color with clearly defined edges. While Kelly emphasized shape, line and space in his work, color was the subject of intense and consistent focus in his practice. Spectrum (1972) is related to the collages that Kelly began in the early 1950s when he was in Paris—a period when he began to work more extensively with color, exploring relationships, systems and composition through chance.
When creating and composing his work, Kelly often made use of collage techniques and cut-outs, balancing the relationship of form and color. Spectrum is a horizontal collage of 13 rectangular, color-saturated paper cut-out strips. These vertical bands of color are concrete units, separated by narrow white areas, which suggest space and depth behind them. Although the spectrum is often divided into seven colors, it is actually continuous. The artist has chosen to organize this work into 13 hues, combining primary colors such as yellow, blue and red with different degrees of their intermediary values of green, purple and orange, starting and ending with yellow on both sides. A continuum is created with a series of individual blocks with consistent gradations in color changes.