Kelly 1:1

Nothing less than a truly unique artwork: a dialogue between American conceptual artist Ellsworth Kelly and Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset. A very rare chance to get your hands on a one-of-a-kind piece of conceptual graphic design.

In the spring of 2002, Experimental Jetset created the installation Kelly 1:1 for the exhibition space Casco in Utrecht. The installation reproduces Ellsworth Kelly’s 1966 painting Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red at actual size, using 150 coloured A4 sheets of paper. Those same 150 sheets were then bound together to form the catalogue of the exhibition: thirty sheets of each colour, gathered into one single publication.

Published in an edition of only 250, this is the book where the whole process behind Experimental Jetset’s deconstruction of graphic design (the conceptual approach that has defined their work for three decades) gets exposed almost like never before. It is also a near-perfect example of the designer’s role as they define it in their monograph Statement and Counter-Statement, released in 2015: “The role we try to fulfill is to design in such a way that the reader (or viewer, or spectator) is constantly aware of the fact that he or she is looking at something human-made: an object that is made by humans, and thus can also be changed by humans”.

The book was published in 2002 to coincide with the exhibition Kelly 1:1 by Experimental Jetset at the Casco Projects gallery in Utrecht, which ran from 11 May to 8 June 2002.