This September, Elizabeth Leach Gallery turns to the beginning. Lee Kelly: Early Works brings together early works on paper, paintings, and sculpture spanning roughly a decade from the late 1950s through the late 1960s, a period predating Kelly's well known large-scale public sculpture for and reveals the premenient thinking which made later works possible.
Kelly, born in McCall, Idaho in 1932, graduated from the Museum Art School at the Portland Art Museum in 1959 and was a central figure in Northwest art until his death in 2022. His monumental works in stainless and cor-ten steel continue his legacy and are embedded in the region's public landscape, at Reed College, Oregon State University, the Washington Park Rose Garden, and Portland's North Park Blocks, to name a few. His work is held by the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Stanford University, and the New Orleans Art Museum, and in 2010 the Portland Art Museum devoted a major career retrospective to his practice.
What is less known is where it started.
The early paintings in this exhibition are rooted in abstract expressionism, with distinct forms emerging from a passionate, muscular application of color. When Kelly shifted his emphasis toward sculpture in the early 1960s, the continuity between the two bodies of work becomes clear: the same formal instincts, the same relationship between mass and space, now extended into three dimensions. These works have not been widely seen since they were made. Showing them alongside early sculpture offers a rare look at an artist in formation, and at the ideas that would eventually take up permanent residence in the public life of this region.
