Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.
—Ellsworth Kelly

Created in 1972, Blue Curve II was completed at an incipient moment of Ellsworth Kelly’s mature practice. In 1970, the artist relocated from his Hotel des Artistes studio in Manhattan to upstate New York, first Chatham and then Spencertown, where he would continue to reside and work for the rest of his life. The move occasioned an introspective period for Kelly, who began returning to earlier ideas and motifs he felt mandated further experimentation. One of these was the curved form which he had abandoned for a while as his focus on rectilinear multiple panels grew during the latter half of the 1960s. In the early 70s, Kelly innovated his previous use of the curve in two ways: he began placing it on shaped canvases and he focused on “radial” as opposed to “free” curves, the former derived from the process of fragmenting the idea of a larger circle while the latter inscribes organic forms. With its gently undulating arch, painted on a parallelogrammatic canvas, Blue Curve II is exemplary of both these developments.

Working with color and line as contrasting agents, Kelly’s practice has been one of creating shapes without resorting to traditional illusionism wherein forms are situated on the canvas to describe volumes within a space. Observation of the world around him is central to this endeavor: a keen photographer, Kelly collects elements from the everyday world, dilating details that one might otherwise overlook. Transferred to his work, the artist locates points of intersection—where shapes become tangential to edges, or where they overlap as planes; pressure points which by drawing attention to the surface destroy the illusion of depth. In Blue Curve II, the curving line created between white and blue finds support neither in perspective nor in the symmetry of volumes, but hovers on the brink between its physicality as line and its allusion to a shape that continues beyond the canvas.