While art and architecture often find themselves at odds (see: MoMA v. Tod Williams Billie Tsien or Frank Lloyd Wright v. art), Ellsworth Kelly has always been an architect’s artist. “Architects are usually the first people who understand my work,” the abstract artist — and TWBT and Peter Zellner collaborator / well-known Frank Gehry pal — has said.
It turns out that the minimalist painter is an architect himself. The Blanton Museum of Art has announced plans to build a 2,715-square-foot free-standing structure at the University of Texas, Austin, that Kelly designed for a private collector in 1986 but never realized.
Referred to only as “Austin,” Kelly’s design is embedded with church-like features — stained-glass windows, a “totemic” wooden sculpture, and a procession of 14 black-and-white marble panels along the walls — which draws an easy comparison to the Rothko Chapel at the nearby Menil Collection in Houston. Kelly actually took cues from the Byzantine and Romanesque religious architecture that he encountered while living in Paris in the ’40s and ’50s, but never intended to build a chapel.
“While the simplicity and purity of these forms had a great influence on my art,” he explained in the release, “I conceived this project without a religious program. I hope visitors will experience Austin as a place of calm and light.”
Austin marks Kelly’s first-ever building. Munich-based Michael Mayer of the Franz Meyer stained glass studio will fabricate the colored windows, and California-based Peter Carlson will oversee fabrication of the totem and stone panels, according to Artnet. While the artist gifted the design to the Blanton, construction begins once the museum has bet its $15 million fundraising goals. They’re currently halfway there, according to the release.
Image courtesy the Blanton Museum of Art © 2015 Ellsworth Kelly