For Ellsworth Kelly, the Hamptons were inspiring

Early in his career Ellsworth Kelly experimented with arranging colors by chance. “I wanted to show how any color goes with any other color,” the American abstract painter said. The luscious hues describing the 13 saturated monochromatic panels of his 1969 “Spectrum V” were recorded over a 24-hour period from the glorious open skies over the East End of Long Island.

Surprisingly, although Kelly’s Hamptons sabbaticals significantly affected the trajectory of his art, little attention has been given to them. That is, until the opening this weekend at Guild Hall of an exhibition of some 30 paintings, works on paper, sculptures and photographs (many publicly exhibited for the first time) that Kelly created during sojourns in Springs between 1960 and 1961 and in Bridgehampton in 1968 and ‘69.

“Though abstractions, Kelly’s paintings are very conscious of the world,” says the exhibition’s guest curator Phyllis Tuchman, a point reinforced with the selection of works on view.

The curve of the shell of a horseshoe crab, for instance, captured in several schematic drawings, echoes in the sharply delineated, flatly painted “Dark Blue/White.” So, too, do the leaf- and stemlike contours of “Oak” and “Briar” resound in the bold abstract forms of “White Alice.” The latter painting also appears in a black-and-white photograph of Kelly posing in a clearing near his Springs studio with other large canvases from the period, including “Red on Blue With Orange,” represented in the show by an ink study.

“Whether the imagery is recognizable or not, there are not a lot of extras,” says Tuchman, noting how, by distilling details found in his surroundings to their simplest essence, Kelly’s works maintain a distinct timelessness.

Kelly borrowed from elements visible all around him, including the parallelograms and rectangles describing the facades and roofs of nearby potato barns captured by the artist in a series of gelatin silver prints. “The angles of the barns and the angles of the paintings, you can see their connection immediately,” notes Guild Hall chief curator Christina Strassfield. “The barns added to Kelly’s narrative. He was influenced by their shadows and lines.”

Eventually, Kelly reflected those and other forms in irregularly shaped canvases, redefining the traditional figure-ground relationship and challenging viewers’ perceptions of space. Geometric compositions painted on found pieces of wood included in the show also hint at the direction his work would take.

“I realized I didn’t want to compose pictures . . . I wanted to find them,” the artist once said. “I felt that my vision was choosing things out there in the world and presenting them. . . . There was so much to see, and it all looked fantastic to me.”