Black over Blue 1963

Curator: This is Ellsworth Kelly's "Black over Blue," created in 1963. It's currently held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Editor: Striking. The juxtaposition of the matte black shape against the saturated blue is incredibly assertive, almost confrontational in its simplicity. Curator: Kelly's interest lay in the relationship between form and color, a concept rooted in his observation of the world. This piece reduces those observations to their purest elements. What kind of labor or equipment do you think would have been needed for Kelly to manufacture something like this in 1963? Editor: The shape does echo something found... but here the essence is form: a single, curving plane played against this intense, grounding rectangle. He is absolutely inviting us to examine how we perceive depth and volume. Curator: Kelly, interestingly enough, moved away from pure abstraction in his practice, finding influence in architectural structures he witnessed in the work of industrial manufacturers that served the city. To me, this makes the artwork as much an art object, as an industrially informed commodity of labor, a process for producing shapes using very basic means of production that were not often featured as artwork. Editor: But even acknowledging those contexts, I’m compelled by its deceptively complex surface and shape tensions. The precise way the black form seems to both hover and adhere to the blue—it really gets the mind thinking. Curator: What the mind *sees*. But not necessarily, what it took to put these shapes into place in the artist's labor; how these colors were formulated. He could've picked anything. And as a society, it means so much what we value aesthetically as beautiful, because those things in turn reflect who society ends up paying and caring about! Editor: Ultimately, for me, it highlights the powerful dialogue between the geometry and a gesture; Kelly isolates the essence of those fundamental artistic elements in this striking image. Curator: I am content, though, understanding how the structures of making were what allowed that aesthetic relationship to take form.