Ellsworth Kelly: Color Panels for a Large Wall

In the late 1970s Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was commissioned by architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to create an artwork for the lobby of a new office building underway in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Kelly responded with one of his most ambitious artworks to date, Color Panels for a Large Wall, an 18-panel painting executed in two versions. The larger, at over 125 feet wide, was the biggest painting he had ever made, and its trajectory would pass through not just Cincinnati but also Amsterdam, New York and Munich before ending up at its permanent home, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where it has been prominently installed in the I.M. Pei-designed East Building since 2004.The smaller version, over 30 feet wide, remained in the artist’s possession. This catalog tells the complete story of these two remarkable paintings.