Ellsworth Kelly (born May 31, 1923 - December 27, 2015) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employs bright colors to enhance his works. Ellsworth Kelly lives and works in Spencertown, New York.

Kelly was born the second son of three to Allan Howe Kelly and Florence Bithens Kelly in Newburgh, New York, a town approximately 60 miles north of New York City. His father was an insurance company executive of Scottish-Irish and German descent. His mother was a former schoolteacher of Welsh and Pennsylvania-German stock. His family moved from Newburgh, New York, to New Jersey shortly after he was born. Kelly remembers his mother moving his family around each year to a different house. They lived in many places in New Jersey both in and around the Hackensack area. Many of Kelly’s memories are centered on the time they lived in Oradell, New Jersey a town of nearly 7,500 people at the time. They lived near the Oradell Reservoir where his paternal grandmother Rosenlieb introduced him to bird watching at the age of eight or nine. This introduction to bird watching enabled Kelly to train his eye and develop his appreciation for the physical reality of the world by focusing in on nature’s shapes. This is where he developed his passion for form and color. He continued to further expand his knowledge on this particular passion by studying the works of Louis Agassiz Fuertes and John James Audubon. Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kelly’s work throughout his career. Author E.C. Goossen speculates that the two and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well known can be traced to his bird watching, and his acquaintance with the two and three-color birds he so frequently watched at such an early age. Kelly has said he was constantly alone as a young boy and became somewhat of a "loner". He was also afflicted by a slight stutter that persisted into his teenage years.

Kelly's schooling from the elementary to the high school level followed the conventional public school curriculum, which included art classes that stressed materials and sought to develop the "artistic imagination". This curriculum was typical of the broader trend in schooling that had emerged from the Progressive education theories promulgated by the Columbia University Teacher's College, at which the American modernist painter Arthur Wesley Dow had taught. His parents were reluctant to support Kelly's training in the arts, but a school teacher offered the necessary encouragement. As his parents would only fund technical study, Kelly was educated first at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which he attended from 1941 to 1943, until he was inducted into the Army on New Year’s Day, 1943. Upon his discharge at the end of World War II, Kelly took advantage of the generous G.I. Bill education provisions to study from 1946 to 1947 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he haunted the collections of that city's museums, and then at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he attended classes infrequently, but again immersed himself in the rich artistic resources of the city. While studying in Boston in 1948, Kelly listened to a lecture by Max Beckmann on Paul Cezanne. He moved to Paris in 1948 and got to know John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the Surrealist artist Jean Arp and the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whose simplification of natural forms had a lasting effect on him. It was in Paris that Kelly established his aesthetic.

Upon entering U.S military service in 1943 he requested to be assigned to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, which was normal for artists at the time to do. He was inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey and waited there several weeks for transfer orders that never came. He was then sent off to Camp Hale, Colorado where he trained with mountain ski troops. He had never skied before. His transfer came in six to eight weeks later and he went to Fort Meade, Maryland. During World War II, he served, alongside other artists and designers, in a deception unit known as The Ghost Army. The Ghost soldiers used inflatable tanks, trucks, and other elements of subterfuge to mislead the Axis forces about the direction and disposition of Allied forces. He had a lot of exposure to military camouflage during the time he served. His exposure to the visual art of camouflage can be seen as part of his basic training. Kelly served with the unit from 1943 until the end of the European phase of the war.

Kelly decided to return to America in 1954 after being abroad for six years. His decision to venture back into the New York art scene was sparked after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, to which he felt his work related. Upon his return to New York he found the art world "very tough." The acceptance of his art was anything but rapid. Although Kelly can now be considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American art movement, he was not always seen in such a positive light. It was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly's art and the dominant stylistic trends. In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery. The art he showed in this exhibit was considered by many in the art world to have more of a European flair. He showed at Betty Parsons Gallery in the fall of 1957. He had three pieces, Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels selected and shown for the Whitney Museum of American Art's show "Young America 1957." His pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists' work. Painting in Three Panels, for example, was particularly noted and questioned for the idea of having more than one canvas used to create one piece was unheard of at this time. Critic Michael Plante commented on this use of multiple-panels by noting that more often than not Kelly's multiple-panel pieces were cramped in accordance to the installations restrictions, which resulted in a downplay of the interaction between the pieces and the architecture of the room.

Kelly eventually moved away from Coenties Slip, where he had sometimes shared a studio with fellow artist and friend Agnes Martin, up to the ninth floor of the high-rise studio/co-op Hotel des Artistes at 27 West 67th Street. Since 2001, he has been working in a 20,000 square feet studio designed by the architect Richard Gluckman in Spencertown.

In Paris, Kelly continued to paint the figure, but by May 1949 he had made his first abstract paintings. Observing how light fragmented on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance. In 1952 he started a series of eight collages titled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII. Numbered slips of paper each referred to a colour, one of eighteen different hues to be placed on a grid 40 inches by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages used a different process.

Kelly's discovery in 1952 of Monet's late work infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression: he began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. As a painter he worked from then on in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the Minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s. Kelly's relief painting Blue Tablet (1962), for example, was included in the seminal exhibition "Toward a New Abstraction" at the Jewish Museum in 1963. During the 1960s he started working with irregularly angled canvases, and in the 1970s he added curved shapes to his repertoire. A larger series of twelve works Kelly started in 1972 and did not complete until 1983, "Gray" was originally conceived as an anti-war statement and is drained of color. In 1979 he began again to employ curves in two-colour paintings made of separate panels. In his recent painting, Kelly has distilled his palette and introduced forms never before seen in his work. In each work, he starts with a rectangular canvas that he carefully paints with many coats of white paint; a shaped canvas, mostly painted black, is placed on top.

Kelly has been making drawings of plants and flowers since the late 1940s and continues to do so today. Kelly first experimented with reductive geometry in paint and wood in 1949. He took up printmaking in a concerted fashion in the mid-1960s, when he produced his Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs (1964-66) with Maeght Editeur in Paris. Since then he has collaborated primarily with Gemini G.E.L.. His initial series of 28 transfer lithographs, entitled "Suite of Plant Lithographs", marked the beginning of a corpus that would grow to 72 prints and countless drawings of foliage. His Purple/Red/Gray/Orange (1988), at eighteen feet in length, may be the largest single-sheet lithograph ever made.

Although Kelly may be better known for his paintings, he has also pursued sculpture throughout his career. In 1958, Kelly conceived one of his first wood sculptures, Concorde Relief I (1958), a modestly scaled wall relief in elm, which explores the visual play and balance between two rectangular forms layered on top of each other, the uppermost with its top-right and lower-left corners removed. He has made 30 sculptures in wood throughout his career. From 1959 onwards, he created freestanding folded sculptures. In 1973 he began regularly making large-scale outdoor sculpture, in a variety of materials including aluminum, bronze, and weathering steel. and often in totem-like configurations such as Curve XXIII (1981). While the totemic forms his freestanding sculptures can measure up to 15 feet tall, his wall reliefs can span more than 14 feet wide. Kelly's sculpture "is founded on its adherence to absolute simplicity and clarity of form."

Although the source of the piece is usually unidentifiable to the viewer's eye, there is almost always a source behind the forms he creates. Kelly creates his pieces using a succession of ideas on various forms. He may start with a drawing, enhance the drawing to create a print, take the print and create a freestanding piece, which is then made into a sculpture. Kelly's sculptures are meant to be entirely simple and can been viewed quickly, often only in one glance. The viewer observes smooth, flat surfaces that are secluded from the space that surrounds them. This sense of flatness and minimalism make it hard to tell the difference between the foreground and background. Kelly's Blue Disc was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, "Primary Structures" alongside many much younger artists just beginning to work with minimal forms.

William Rubin noted that "Kelly's development had been resolutely inner-directed: neither a reaction to Abstract Expressionism nor the outcome of a dialogue with his contemporaries." Many of his paintings consist of a single (usually bright) color, with some canvases being of irregular shape, sometimes called "shaped canvases." The quality of line seen in his paintings and in the form of his shaped canvases is very subtle, and implies perfection. This is demonstrated in his piece Block Island Study 1959.

Kellys background in the military has been suggested as a source of the seriousness of his works. While serving time in the army, Kelly was exposed to and influenced by the camouflage with which his specific battalion worked. This close contact helped enlighten him on the use of form and shadow as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible. It was a basic part of Kelly's early education as an artist. Ralph Coburn, a friend of Kelly’s from Boston, introduced the technique of automatic drawing to him while he was visiting Kelly in Paris. Kelly embraced this technique of arriving at an image without looking at the sheet of paper upon which the image is drawn. These techniques helped Kelly in loosening his particular drawing style and broaden his acceptance of what he believed to be art. Kelly's illness and coexistent depression may possibly be related to his use of black and white during his last year in Paris. The influence of Kelly's admiration for Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are apparent in his work. His ability to view things in various ways and work in different mediums is in thanks to them. Piet Mondrian influences the different forms he uses in both his paintings and sculptures for they are nonobjective. Kelly was first influenced by the art and architecture of the Romanesque and Byzantine eras while he was studying in Paris. His introduction to Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism influenced his work and caused him to test the abstraction of geometric forms.

Kelly's first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Arnaud, Paris, in 1951. In 1957, he completed his first public commission, sculptural works for the lobby of the Penn Center in Philadelphia. In 1959 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's ground-breaking exhibition, Sixteen Americans. Kelly was invited to show at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1961. His work was later included in the Documenta in 1977, 1977, and 1991. A room of his paintings was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Kelly's first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. His work has since been recognized in numerous retrospective exhibitions, including a sculpture exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982; an exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada from 1987-88; and a career retrospective in 1996 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Since then, solo exhibitions of Kelly's work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge (1999), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988/2002), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2007), and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007). In 1993, the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris mounted the exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: The French Years, 1948-54" about the artist's relationship with the city, which travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; in 2008, the Musée d'Orsay honored Kelly with the exhibition "Correspondences: Paul Cezanne Ellsworth Kelly".

Kelly is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles. The facade of Marks's Los Angeles gallery, was inspired by Study for Black and White Panels, a collage he made while living in Paris in 1954, and a painting, Black Over White. From 1964 he produced prints and editioned sculptures at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics Ltd near New York City.

Haus der Kunst exhibited the first comprehensive retrospective of Kelly's black and white works from October 7, 2011 through January 22, 2012.

In 1957 Kelly was commissioned to produce a 65-foot-long wall sculpture for the Transportation Building at Penn Center in Philadelphia, his largest work to that date. Largely forgotten, the sculpture entitled Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957) was eventually dismantled. Kelly has since executed many public commissions, including Wright Curve (1966), a steel sculpture designed for permanent installation in the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theater; a mural for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1969; Curve XXII (I Will) at Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1981; the Houston Triptych, vertical bronze planes mounted on a tall concrete at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1986; Totem (1987), a sculpture for the Parc de la Creueta del Coll, Barcelona; the Dallas Panels (Blue Green Black Red) (1989) for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas; a two-part memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1993; and large-scale panels for the Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin, in 1998. For the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse (designed by Henry N. Cobb) in Boston he designed the The Boston Panels, 21 brilliantly colored aluminum panels installed in the central rotunda as a single work throughout the building.

Kelly's two-paneled Blue Black (2001), 28 feet tall and made of painted honeycomb aluminum, was commissioned for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, and the large-scale bronze Untitled (2005) was commissioned specifically for the courtyard of the Phillips Collection. In 2005, Kelly was commissioned with the only site-specific work for the Modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago by Renzo Piano. He created White Curve, the largest wall sculpture he has ever made, which is on display since 2009.

Kelly's work is in many public collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and Tate Modern, London. In 1999, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that it had bought 22 works, paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures, by Ellsworth Kelly. They have been valued at more than $20 million. In 2003, the Menil Collection received Kelly's Tablet, 188 framed works on paper, including sketches, working drawings and collages. Notable private collectors include, among others, Eli Broad and Gwyneth Paltrow.