Following the success in 2025 of its major retrospective devoted to Barbara Hepworth, which brought renewed public attention to the modern British artist, the Fondation Maeght presents, until 15 November 2026, a major exhibition dedicated to the American artist Ellsworth Kelly. Entitled Ellsworth Kelly – At the Edge of Water, the exhibition explores — for the first time — the presence of water in the artist’s work, through an approach that is both iconographic and methodological, conceived by guest curator Éric de Chassey, a leading specialist of Kelly’s oeuvre. Through its unprecedented thematic focus, the exhibition positions itself as a significant contribution to art history, offering a renewed understanding of Kelly’s work and of his working method.
“In my paintings, I do not invent; my ideas come from a constant investigation of the appearance of things.” Ellsworth Kelly, 1991
A major figure in American art, Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is celebrated for his large-scale abstract works. While resolutely non-figurative, these works nevertheless maintain a sustained and exacting relationship to the artist’s perception of the world. Liquid elements in particular captivated his attention throughout his life, giving rise to observational drawings, abstract paintings and sculptures, as well as collages whose forms emerge from specific experiences of vision at the water’s edge. Kelly persistently sought out aquatic environments, spending extended periods beside oceans, seas, rivers and estuaries — notably at Belle-Île in Brittany, on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, in Giverny, in Sanary and along the Côte d’Azur, as well as at Coenties Slip in New York and in Saint-Martin in the Caribbean. In these works, he does not reproduce visible reality; rather, he translates the very perception of water — its chromatic shifts, the play of light upon its surface — notably through collages in which coloured abstract forms seem to surface from liquid expanses before being distilled into fully realised paintings and sculptures.
For Kelly, waterscapes constituted an inexhaustible source of visual paradox: a planar surface endowed with spatial complexity; stillness perpetually in motion; a vast expanse suggesting infinity yet bounded by edges.
Curated by Éric de Chassey in close collaboration with the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, the exhibition will bring together more than one hundred works — from monumental paintings and sculptures to intimate, postcard-scale formats — offering a fresh reading of a central yet long-unexamined theme at the heart of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The exhibition also underscores Kelly’s early and enduring ties to the Maeght family. In 1948, having participated in the Allied landings in 1944 and supported by the G.I. Bill, Kelly returned to France. He was swiftly exhibited in Paris at the Galerie Maeght and stayed on several occasions at the Maeght family home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. His friendship with Adrien Maeght endured until the end of his life.
“By concentrating on a single yet fundamental motif throughout Kelly’s career — often understated or even imperceptible in the final works — this exhibition offers an extraordinary means of understanding the depth and rigour of the artist’s working method.”
— Éric de Chassey
To accompany Ellsworth Kelly – At the Edge of Water, the Fondation Maeght will publish a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Éric de Chassey (Fondation Maeght editions). The exhibition will also form the centrepiece of an “American Season” bringing together concerts (including programmes devoted to Duke Ellington, Sun Ra and Philip Glass), performances and public events exploring American artistic creation.
About Éric de Chassey, Guest curator
Éric de Chassey is Director of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the École normale supérieure de Lyon (currently on secondment). Between 2009 and 2015, he was Director of the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis, and then Director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art from 2016 to 2025.
Éric de Chassey has published numerous books on the work of Henri Matisse, as well as on American and European art, transatlantic cultural relations, and the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in connection with counterculture and politics.
In 2024, he was awarded the Prix Pierre Daix for his book Donner à voir. Images de Birkenau, du Sonderkommando à Gerhard Richter, published by Éditions Gallimard in the “Art et Artistes” series. He has also curated numerous exhibitions in France, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, including several devoted to the work of Ellsworth Kelly (in Paris; St. Louis, USA; Rome; and Avignon).
About the Fondation Maeght
The Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation was the first non-profit foundation in France dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Since 1982, Mr Adrien Maeght has served as President of its Board of Trustees. The Board comprises eleven members, including representatives of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of the Interior, four members of the Maeght family, and four personalities from the worlds of art and business.
