The elegant 'Malta' reliefs (1984-1986), with angular negative shapes, dropped the garish colour and focused on deep curved shiny metal forms. These curved magnesium pieces were etched with grids of colourful cross-hatching and frenetic scribble so they looked manually produced, not factory manufactured.
FRANK STELLA SERIES
'Circuits' (1980-1984) was a series of densely layered metal elements that overall usually resembled a rectangle. This ostentation continued with the 'Indian Birds' series (1977-1979) that came from a residency in India where he incorporated discarded metal sheets of flubbed soft-drink can labels. In the 'Exotic Birds' series (1976-1980) he created a mixture of flashy allusions to Pablo Picasso's cubist sculpture and Jackson Pollock's painting, mixed with the shapes of office draughting equipment like French curves, T-squares, and triangles.
In the late 1970s Stella started to explore the malleable properties of honeycombed aluminium, etched magnesium, and painted metal tubing to explore an exuberant Baroque sensibility. With exceptionally thick stretchers these joined up curved and multi-coloured hemispheres seem a celebration of Islamic art and Orphism, and dominate any gallery they inhabit. Stella's immense 'Protractor' series (1967-1971), with 27 configurations, combined his interest in Henri Matisse with a playful curiosity about the geometric angle-measuring tool. This downplayed a little his bodily involvement in producing his work but emphasised his role as primary decisionmaker. The related 'Notched V' series (1964-1965), on the other hand, was polychromatic and compact, with its dramatic V-shaped sections arranged in isolation, pairs, or trios: each having its own sombre hue.įrom the midpoint of this decade on, as he developed a range of new types of painting, Stella took on more and more assistants and technicians, and subcontracted assembling and cutting work to fabrication shops. The 'Running V' series (1964-1965) were monochromes extended horizontally along the wall and dramatically exploited chevron directional interruptions that dramatically changed their silhouettes. The careful but loose application caused the 'pinstripes' to flicker, and the soft dark bands to appear ominous and restless. Stella achieved initial fame through his large holistic Black Paintings (1958-1960) featuring wide parallel bands of matte black house-painting enamel, applied with a house-painting brush on raw canvas, with no masking in between. Initially Stella worked part-time in New York as a house painter, but began a long career of staggeringly innovative artworks-sequentially exploring different sorts of support shape, support material, paint and colour type, surface quality, and illusory or real space.
Inspired by Jasper Johns' Green Target (1955) he moved to New York in 1958.
He then went to Princeton University to major in history, and did painting courses with curator William Seitz and artist Stephen Greene. Stella grew up in Boston and never went to art school, but he did make some abstract paintings at Phillips Academy, Andover.
0 kommentar(er)
