Shadows and Angles Beyond the Calm, at Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Like many of his colleagues in the upper echelons of household-name American abstractionists — in the Abstract Expressionist, Minimalist, and other schools — Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) enjoys reflexive name/look recognition. The very mention of his name conjures up impressions of the signature look and attitude of his ventures into painting and sculpture.

That said, when paying a visit to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) to catch the quietly dazzling new exhibition Shape, Ground, Shadow: The Photographs of Ellsworth Kelly, it may be helpful to forget what you know about Ellsworth Kelly. More to the point, it may be helpful to reframe what you think you know on the subject.

Notably, the SBMA project is the first museum exhibition showcasing Kelly’s sideline artistic pursuit as a photographer. What could be seen, on paper, as a lesser ancillary part of Kelly’s output becomes, on impact, something substantial, on the works’ own terms and as an illuminating background subplot and companion piece to his best-known body of work as an abstract artist known for his vibrant yet almost ascetically restrained aesthetic touch/eye.

Curated by Charles Wylie, SBMA’s Curator of Photography and New Media in conjunction with the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation — and timed as part of the EK 100 centennial of the artist’s birth — Shape, Ground, Shadow lives up to its title, referencing key qualities in Ellsworth’s prints, in sync with his canvases and sculpture. The images may document realities and real worldly facets of time, place, and materials caught through his lens, but the abstract sensibility is ever on the prowl.

These are mostly “found” images, caught on the fly by an observant eye. A salient quote can be found on the McCormick Gallery wall attesting to Kelly’s approach to his camera work: “I realized I didn’t want to compose pictures … I wanted to find them.”

He found some oddly affecting beauties. An unexpected visual allure comes together in the blend of line, texture, and resulting atmosphere in “Balcony, Belle-Île-en-Mer,” from 1977. Some enigmatic factor guides the vertical image “Garage, Hudson,” a composition neatly subdivided by the central white garage corner plank. To the left are primly stacked gray wood slats, and to the right, an ultra-soft-focus view of the ambiguous yard in the perimeter. A master of delicate balance is at work.

Whereas some of Kelly’s most identifiable artworks are steeped in rich, flat color planes — as we’re reminded through a selection of art catalogs in the gallery — the only color photograph here is “Wall, Shadow and Sky, St. Louis,” a carefully composed yet abstraction-suggestive meeting of deep blue sky, pale gray concrete, and a triangular slice of shadow.

Along the path through this selection of 60 images, we catch sight and suggestion of Kelly’s artistic voice in his mainstream mode, starting with the almost calligraphic shadowy forms in the small entryway images “Stairways, St. Martin,” from 1977. The stripes against a murky dark backdrop in “Beach Cabana III, Meschers” (1950), and the linear dance of another shot from the southwestern French seaside outpost of Meschers, “Shadows on Stairs,” discernibly correlate with the visual proclivities of his studio art.

A languidly curving shadow in the stark black-and-white setting of “Shadow, St. Louis” hints at his preferred palette of shapes as a painter, and devotion to shape and line are the primary elements behind the tellingly titled “Curve Seen from a Highway, Austerlitz, New York.”

Interestingly, a striking and elegant series of rustic barn portraits (“Barns, Long Island” is the prize of the bunch) triggers memories of the powerful summer exhibition in this gallery, devoted to James Castle, who created introspective rural drawings with soot, spit, and organic genius.

For reasons I can’t quite explain (a sign of good, transcendent art beholding), one of the most fascinating pictures in the room is another shot from Kelly’s Meschers series. As telegraphed by its self-explanatory title, “Bricks, Meschers” tells the literal what-and-where story of the image. But somehow, the sublime balance of a precarious brick pile — its ultimate fate supplying a pinch of suspense — amid hints of animal and farm life tucked into the margins adds up to potent, enigmatic photographic poetry.

Consider “Bricks” a stepping-stone to the awakening of an important artist’s voice as an abstract master, cognizant of the concrete outside world but looking and venturing deep within some secret turf even he didn’t quite comprehend.

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Shape, Ground, Shadow: The Photographs of Ellsworth Kelly is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 14, 2024. See sbma.net.