Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

A Retrospective by Frank Stella at Whitney Museum of American Art

The Museum will present a career retrospective of Frank Stella (b. 1936), one of the most important living American artists. This survey will be the most comprehensive presentation of Stella’s career to date, showcasing his prolific output from the mid-1950s to the present through approximately 120 works, including paintings, reliefs, maquettes, sculptures, and drawings. Co-organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Whitney, this exhibition will feature Stella’s best-known works alongside rarely seen examples drawn from collections around the world.

Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

The exhibition has been organized by Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, and Michael Auping, chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth, working closely with Mr. Stella. Their inspired idea was to make the presentation generally chronological while also jumping around in time, sometimes juxtaposing pieces up to 20 years apart to create stimulating clashes of color, form and process.

Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

In 1960 Stella started introducing right angles into his stripes, but a funny thing happened: on a rectangular canvas, once you change the shape of the stripes, you’re left with a blank space. Stella’s ingenious solution was to cut away the leftover parts of the canvas, and to stretch the remainder on a shaped armature, with corners incised or a central hole evacuated. They were his first forays into a career-long obsession with diagonal, twisted, or otherwise irregular canvas shapes.

Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

Stella’s supports are as important as his surfaces. With his irregular polygons, the stripes were gone, replaced by angular expanses of hot pink and deep green on canvases in the shape of wonky nonagons. Then came curved canvases, in the form of his protractors: concentric arcs of the sort of solid colours found in posters for Woodstock, and which have graced decades of pages of Architectural Digest.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective
Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC
Oct 30, 2015–Feb 7, 2016

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