Ellsworth Kelly describes the 30 wood sculptures he created over the span of four decades between 1958 and 1996 as his "totems." This body of work, although only a small proportion of the artist's lifetime sculpture and far less known than his work in metal, has a talismanic intimacy for Kelly that distinguishes it from the rest of his hard-edged oeuvre.

»Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture« presents a retrospective of these wood sculptures for the first time, offering an investigation into the development of this intensely personal expression of Kelly's commitment to abstract art--and to nature. Many of these wood sculptures, now in private collections, are rarely seen and hardly known by the public. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2011, this book speaks to the artist's lifetime of acute visual observation and how deeply "of nature" his work has always been.