Ellsworth Kelly
Until March 6; Ingleby Gallery

In today’s world of precocious, media-savvy artists for whom the idea is everything, it is easy to assume that contemporary art has signed its divorce papers with mid-20th century modernism. Not so. The American artist Ellsworth Kelly, now 80-years old, shared post-war Paris with Matisse, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro, and Alexander Calder. Returning to New York in the 1950s he brought with him a unique brand of minimalist abstraction which he has pursued without ostentation ever since.

Kelly’s paintings and sculptures are made of basic geometric shapes, often only one colour or two. They are grand in scale and although entirely abstract, these universal forms are rooted in shapes and colours snatched from the world of appearances – like a discarded, squashed paper cup or the curve of a bridge and its shadow.

Kelly has a particular way of seeing the world, of finding compelling shapes in the spaces between things and pairing them down to their essentials. When Richard Ingleby’s wife Florence gave him a West African curio as a gift, he saw the same principles at work, and has interspersed these ceremonial currency forms with Kelly’s recent lithographs.

The metal sculptures from the Congo, Chad and Cameroon are flat forms inspired by things in the real world – human figures, a jelly-fish, a spade – reduced to abstract outlines whose shadows are an even purer distillation of that vision. They sit comfortably amongst Kelly’s prints, in dialogue with them: a spindly, angular human form from Chad points cheekily at Kelly’s six-sided shape, Red, which points right back.

It is always a joy – and a relief – to understand the inspiration behind Kelly’s most formal arrangements, and this is possible with a few of the smaller prints in the show, Blue Curve, Red Curve and their black states. A catalogue is casually placed close by, its cover a snowy hill-slope which Kelly photographed in 1970; the composition is identical to the prints, whose rich harmony is de-mystified.

Perhaps the most successful work in the show is Diptych: Dark Blue/Green. The eye sees two black squares at first, before registering their convex and concave outlines. Next you notice the subtle difference in colour, a warmly balanced partnership between navy blue and forest green. Demonstrating the slow-burning nature of Kelly’s ideas, these shapes are exact echoes of two large steel sculptures the artist made in 1982, one of which is now at the Tate.

The larger of the two rooms is arranged with almost painful levels of taste and discretion, the generous wall space allowing the prints, large and small, plenty of room to breathe. Kelly’s work is notoriously difficult to accommodate in small gallery spaces and a sense of this is felt in the smaller room, whose dense crowd of prints and sculptures – all of which are sharp and pointy – create a sense of menace and claustrophobia.

While the monumentality of the artists’s paintings is undisputed, Kelly’s lithographs are a difficult way into his art: they are the most clinical, sterile reductions of his vision, imprisoned in their frames unlike their African counterparts. The tribal sculptures go some way to alleviating this impersonality but they just stop short of overwhelming the prints: it will be interesting to see, at the end of the day, which sells better.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 08.02.04