Study for Blue Green Yellow Orange Red

Beginning in 1965, Kelly abandoned the "figure/ground" style in which he had been working for the past decade and returned to creating serial monochromatic panels. These paintings became more strictly geometric and removed from the observational sources that motivated his earlier paintings. Blue Green Yellow Orange Red is among a group of Kelly's paintings from this period which consist of either rectangular or square canvases in groups of two to thirteen panels. Kelly strengthened the formal qualities and rhythms of these works by rendering them solely in primary colors. Using multiple panels became a means of dividing monochromatic surfaces and identifying the painting as a "structured object rather than an arena of expressionist gesture" (no. 45 ).