Celebrating Artist Ellsworth Kelly

The U.S. Postal Service will celebrate the career of artist Ellsworth Kelly with the issuance of 10 stamps celebrating his talent as a painter and sculptor. With these stamps, the U.S. Postal Service showcases examples of his wide-ranging body of work.

The First-Day-Of-Issue ceremony will be on Friday, May 31, at 11 a.m. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation in Spencertown, NY.

Characterized by precise shapes rendered in bold, flat colors, Ellsworth Kelly’s art encompasses painting, sculpture and works on paper, drawing on careful observations of light and shadow, negative space and line and form. In painting shapes — like a tennis court, a smokestack on a tugboat, or the roof of a barn — as flat planes of color, Kelly removed their dimensionality and turned reality into abstraction. He was also one of the first artists to create shaped canvases and to integrate art with modern architecture, taking great care about the size of a painting, its boundaries, and its placement in relation to the walls and floor.

A sheet will feature 20 stamps, 10 each of Kelly’s artwork, including “Yellow White” (1961), “Colors for a Large Wall” (1951), “Blue Red Rocker” (1963), “Spectrum I” (1953), “South Ferry” (1956), “Blue Green" (1962), “Orange Red Relief” (1990), “Meschers” (1951), “Red Blue" (1964), and “Gaza” (1956). A detail from “Blue Yellow Red III” (1971) appears in the selvage.