Leila Heller Gallery Dubai is presenting a collection of seminal works by legendary American artist Frank Stella. The octogenarian, based in New York, is a pioneer of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. His experiments with form, style, colour and medium led to the inclusion of his works in several significant exhibitions that defined postwar art, such as “Sixteen Americans” (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959), “Geometric Abstraction” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1962) “The Shaped Canvas” (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964-65), “Systemic Painting” (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966), and “Structure of Colour” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971).
As a young artist in New York, Stella reacted against the expressive use of paint by the abstract expressionists of the time, and began producing works that emphasised the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something physical or emotional.
He expressed this new aesthetic in his series of “Black Paintings”, where regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. He was just in his mid-twenties when he became known internationally for these “Black Paintings”, which became the foundation of the discourse of minimalism from the 1960s onwards.
Later, Stella’s paintings became more colourful, and he also began using aluminium and copper paint, and canvases in unusual shapes. During the 1970s, he introduced relief into his art, which he described as “maximalist” painting because of its sculptural qualities. He began pushing the limits of the pictorial, exploding the boundaries of the canvas in high relief works where he strove to “paint without painting”, and experimenting with form and material.
His shaped canvases took on even less regular forms, in series such as “Eccentric Polygon”, and he also introduced elements of collage such as pieces of canvas pasted on plywood. His work also became more three-dimensional, including large, free-standing metal pieces that were painted. After initially using wood and other materials, he began to use aluminium as the primary support for his paintings, and his high relief sculptural pieces became more elaborate and exuberant, marked by curving forms, Day-Glo colours, and scrawled brushstrokes.
The six, large scale, high-relief works displayed in the exhibition represent Stella’s heroic refutation of the dialogue about the death of painting, and his refusal of the spiritualist discourse of abstraction. In these works, the artist has replaced the canvas with the literalist production of space in collaged, high contrast, bold forms designed to engage and unsettle viewers.
“Zejtun” is an example of Stella’s early experiments in this direction. The piece is from the Malta series, which was inspired by the architecture he saw in Malta, during a visit to the island nation in 1983. Composed of honeycombed aluminium, the work speaks about the artist’s desire to address and to move beyond the bounds of painting while preserving the effects of the tableau in his quest for the continual materialisation of space.
Also on display are two works, “Giufa E La Berreta Rossa” (Giufa and the Red Beret), and “La Scienza della Fiacca”, (The science of laziness) that exemplify the artist’s transition from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality.
The works, fabricated from oil, enamel and alkyd paint on canvas, etched magnesium, aluminium and fibreglass, are from Stella’s “Cones and Pillars” series, created between 1984 and 1987, which he described as “a battle of forms fighting for position in the paintings”. The gestural narrative works express Stella’s rejection of the idea that abstraction necessarily commands reduction. The forms in these works are inspired by a late 19th century diagrammatic drawing in an architectural treatise on classical stone cutting, with the floating stones, protruding with both illusionist depth and literal vibrancy in a high contrast conflict of form.
The titles of the works in this series reflect Stella’s Italian heritage, with each work named after a chapter in Italio Calvino’s “Italian Folktales”, which is a collection of ancient folklore. Giufa and the Red Beret refers to a series of funny tales about a foolish man from Sicily, named Giufa, and “The Science of Laziness” is a story about a lazy Turkish father, who wishes to educate his son in the art of doing nothing.
Between 1986 and 1997, Stella created hundreds of works inspired by the 135 chapters of Herman Melville’s famous book, “Moby Dick”. During this time, the increasingly deep relief of his paintings gave way to full three-dimensionality, with sculptural forms derived from cones, pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative architectural elements.
To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created with the help of assistants, industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies of the time. The physical gestural works of organic dynamic forms in this series can be read as a metaphor for the artist’s own Ahab-like unrelenting struggle against the weight of the limits of abstraction and the picture plane. This large body of work is represented in the show by the 1991, mixed media maquette, “The Honor and Glory of Whaling”.
Jyoti Kalsi is an arts-enthusiast based in Dubai.
“Frank Stella” will run at Leila Heller Gallery Dubai, Al Quoz, until January 4.
