American painter, sculptor and commercial designer, Kelly was one of the major post war practitioners of Abstract art in the United States. At the beginning of the 50s, he developed a very particular approach to art which had a strong influence the course of Minimal Art. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, at the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts and travelled widely in Europe. In 1948, he returned to Paris where, in 1949, he produced his first abstract paintings. Picasso, Surrealist drawing techniques and the work of choreographer, Merce Cunningham are some of the other sources of inspiration for his work. By the end of the 50s, Kelly had achieved a firm worldwide reputation and, in the 60s, he moved towards Op Art and the use of geometrical configurations and contrasts of colour that created a certain perceptual ambiguity. His work of this period was a bridge between American geometrical abstraction of the 30s and 40s and Minimalism and the reductive art of the 60s and 70s. Between 1964 and 1992, he took part in documenta 3, 4, 6 and 9, in Kassel and, in 1966, in the Venice Biennale. In 1973, he began producing large scale public sculptures on a regular basis, using steel, iron, aluminium, stainless steel and, in the 80s, bronze. In 1989-90, he organised his own exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute and at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 1998, major retrospectives of his work were held in New York, Los Angeles and Munich.
