Frank Stella: A Retrospective – the exhibition

Huge paintings with nothing but regular colour stripes, steel sculptures, reliefs, maquettes: over 50 works of the expressionist Frank Stella are going to be showed at De Young museum in Sand Francisco. “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” is an expansive presentation surveying the career of this towering figure in post-WWII American art, representing the artist’s prolific output from the late 1950s to the present day and revealing his dramatic influence on the cultural landscape over the last six decades.

“Frank Stella: A Retrospective” – is organized by the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/stella) can be visited at De Young San Francisco between November 5, 2016 and February 26, 2017.

Frank Stella, Miniature Benjamin Moore

About the exhibition: “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” begins with the artist’s rarely seen early works before moving on to the highly acclaimed Black Paintings, introduced at the Museum of Modern Art’s Sixteen Americans exhibition of 1959–1960. Continuing with his groundbreaking Aluminum (1960) and Copper (1960–1961) series of paintings, which feature the artist’s first shaped canvases, these sections of the exhibition reveal Stella’s affinities with ideas that were further pursued by minimalists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre.

Frank Stella, Harran

The exhibition also contains major works from the artist’s Exotic Bird (1976-1980) and Circuit (1980-1984) series. This section addresses the artist’s interest in expanding the surfaces of his paintings outward by projecting sheets of cut metal from the picture plane, and in further activating those surface gestures by drawing on them and adding various reflective materials. Stella first burst into the New York art world in 1959 (with Black Paintings, included in Sixteen Americans), at the age of 23. Over the next several decades, Stella anticipated and pioneered many of the explosive changes in the art world, and remains an enduring figure of both critical and popular attention, as well as controversy.

Frank Stella, Das Erdbeben in Chili

Frank Stella, Gobba zoppa e collotorto, 1985

Frank Stella, St Michael’s Counterguard

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/stella) “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” can be visited at De Young San Francisco between November 5, 2016 and February 26, 2017.

Photography: courtesy of De Young San Francisco

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