Ellsworth Kelly
Color Panels for a Large Wall, 1978

Color Panels for a Large Wall is among Ellsworth Kelly's most expansive color grids, with eighteen panels, each a single hue, and no two hues alike. This gargantuan 1978 work is based on paintings that Kelly did in the 1950s, in which he began with a grid of predetermined modular units, then made each one of those units a separate color (which he often took from color-sample books), and finally organized the colored panels using chance. Kelly's panels challenge traditional notions about painting, especially the idea that color creates an illusion of space, or that there's a relationship between what we call figure and what we call ground, where some colors seem to come forward in a composition and other colors seem to recede. The grids that Kelly deployed have no foreground, no background. Instead color is imagined as an object in space.

This work was originally shown at the Cincinnati Central Trust Company, and the eighteen panels were arranged as two rows of nine. But Kelly imagined this work to be site-specific, seen in relationship to the architecture around it. So when it came to the National Gallery, the artist reorganized it and stacked it differently. Here the work takes up so much space that it almost can't be grasped in its entirety; it actually exceeds one's vision–and that's the idea Kelly wanted to convey in this installation.