Two important exhibitions will be opening later this month at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA.) “Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Painting,” which debuts on January 22, is the first retrospective of Kelly’s print work since 1988. In addition, the first large-scale, international exhibition of women surrealist artists in North America premieres January 29.

After World War II, during which time he was in active service, Ellsworth Kelly was one of the major practitioners of Abstract Art. After spending time abroad, he returned to the United States and came into contact with the movements of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, but never fully assimilated either movement.

While he was one of the first artists to work with irregular canvasses, he is best known for
his minimalistic, multi-paneled and often monochromatic canvases, such as “Cite” from
1951. However, Kelly also employs the use of bright, hard-edged forms in works like “Red,
Blue, Green” from 1963.

 The LACMA exhibit will highlight Kelly’s prints, exhibiting over 100 works on paper. These print works will showcase the variety to be found in Kelly’s work, including such images as the impressionistic “The Seine” from 2005 and the quintessential “Colors on a Grid” from 1976. The exhibit will also feature prints from his earliest experiment with lithography, “Suite of Plant Lithographs” from the mid-1960s.

Rounding out the display will be paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, including works on loan such
as the 1968 “Red Orange White Green Blue” from the Norton Simon Museum of Art, as well
as “Black Relief over White” from 2004, loaned by a local private collection.

Also, opening on January 29th, is “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.” This exhibit invites the viewer to take a trip down the rabbit hole and view the work of iconic figures such as Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Also represented, are less well-known or newly discovered practitioners of Surrealism, bringing the number of artists on display to nearly 50.

While some of these women might have begun as male artist’s models/muses, such as Lee Miller, or had famous artist husbands, such as Dorothea Tanning, they went on to make their own mark as artists, particularly during the years of World War II and directly after.

Past exhibitions have in large part continued to focus only on the male counterparts of these women, relegating the female role in Surrealism to that of the fetishized object.

This exhibit focuses largely on the art of identity, including many portraits, but particularly self-portraits. While almost every artist creates numerous self-portraits, Kahlo was particularly known for the tremendous number of self-portraits in her oeuvre, and the exhibition will include her famous “Self-Portrait with a Collar of Thorns and Hummingbird.”

A plethora of other themes are also explored including Feminism, Abstraction and the Body. Over 150 works will be exhibited from a broad array of media, including painting, sculpture and film, and covering the years from 1931-1968.

 The show is co-organized by LACMA and the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City.(Report: Christine Bolli for ARTFIXdaily)