Ellsworth Kelly - Public Commissions

Public Commissions

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; a 1985 commission by I. M. Pei for the Raffles City building in Singapore; 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 1989 sculpture for the headquarters of Nestlé in Vevey, Switzerland; Gaul (1993), a monumental sculpture commissioned by the Institute d'Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France; a two-part memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1993; and large-scale Berlin 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.

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