'Broadway' (1958)
Liverpool UK has a number of high profile galleries, not least the Liverpool incarnation of the Tate gallery franchise.
Settled in the relatively small, but not inconsiderable, ground floor gallery is an excellent mini-retrospective of prints and paintings by American artist Ellsworth Kelly.
Kelly’s work is an exercise in high-quality wrongness, each distortion of the flat, coloured and rectangular seems retrospectively obvious. Obvious in the same way a successful melody seems contained and complete, even prior to being heard.
The elegant incorrectness of Kelly’s best work demands sustained attention. Its refined variance from the strictures imposed by High Modernisms simplification to colour and surface is a continual pleasure.
As somatic deformations of an architectural purity, traps for the eye, Kelly’s paintings loop the experience of the graphically attractive back to the act of reading the design. Looking becomes thinking about looking whilst simultaneously enjoying the activity.
As a return for time spent in front of any object it is hard to know how that can be improved on.
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