Ellsworth Kelly
Until January 28 2009; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

Sometimes the hardest art to fathom is the most ludicrously simple. Details are so stripped back that what remains looks more like the barest beginning than an end result. Ellsworth Kelly has always occupied this territory, his paintings and sculptures proclaiming a single curve here, or a colour there. Now aged 85, the American artist has been pursuing his own brand of abstraction since the 1940s.

Unlike many other colour field painters, Kelly has always maintained that his shapes and colours remain rooted in the real world: borrowing the arch under a bridge, or the slope of a hill, he shakes off the details and distils them into a single, pure element. Often, his eye is caught by the space between forms, a fragment of a piece of nothing.

It was while living in Paris in 1949 that Kelly began to draw from plants. From 1965 he has made lithographs of leaves and fruit, and it’s these disarmingly simple prints – spanning 40 years – which Ingleby has selected from the artist’s own collection.

While most of Kelly’s art has the precision and gloss of hard-edge painting, these prints are its charming antithesis. Lithographs are made by drawing with a crayon on stone, and Kelly revels in this basic, rough-edged freedom. His Catalpa Leaf (Feuille) of 1965-6 is nothing more than two quick, curved lines, meeting to make a leaf. Whoever bought this for over £6000 did it with an appreciation of the simple pleasures in life.

Equally, Kelly’s Oranges, made in the same period, is so pared down to essentials that it becomes warmly funny. Four crude circles bunch together, two of them containing a little dot which makes them surprisingly recognisable as fruit.

Art this minimal can make some people angry – they feel conned by purveyors of nothingness. But even at its most understated, Kelly’s art bursts with infectious enthusiasm. His oak twig stands cheerfully in space, no more and no less than what it is. His wild grape leaves dance across the page, weightless and delicate.

The Ellsworth Kelly best known to the world is austere and highly controlled; this exhibition provides a glimpse underneath the veneer. Behind those shining monochrome surfaces lies a gleeful celebration of a wilting blossom, or a piece of seaweed. The lines are not yet refined, or abstracted beyond recognition – they are a personal, intimate secret shared with us.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.12.08