NYAB Event - Frank Stella Exhibition

Frank Stella Exhibition

Bernard Jacobson Gallery

This event has ended.

Bernard Jacobson Gallery announces the exhibition of works by Frank Stella (born 1936). Stella is one of the most prominent and influential living American artists; he is known to constantly evolve his practice with every new series of works. The exhibition coincides with the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which opens to the public on 30th October.

The exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery will feature works from several important series from the 1990s and 2000s, which demonstrate Stella’s unique sense of space, scale and composition.

The centerpiece of the show is a monumental 7-panel piece “Die Marquise von O…” (1991).¨ The title refers to a novella by German poet Heinrich von Kleist, a solitary genius and visionary writer who committed suicide at the age of 34 in 1811. His characters, like the Marquise von O, a young widow who mysteriously finds herself pregnant, are shown in moments of deep crises and doubts, while the dramatic narratives often end without resolution.

In the seven large panels, which constitute the painting, the shapes that continue from one panel to the next seem to move, as if the tension and lines of force had exploded the piece into multiple fragments - this time laterally. What Stella had previously done in three dimensions he continues in this work across the two dimensional surface. He has constructed the work, element-by-element, and form-by-form, the same way sculpture and buildings are made. Frank Stella stated, “When it’s successful the result creates a visual experience, but it does something more. It makes available to you both a kind of experience and information that you couldn’t have gotten any other way”.

Another remarkable group of works on show are wall-mounted sculptures, such as Dalma Tepe (2002) or Giyan V (e) (2002), named after key archeological sites in ancient Anatolia, the seat of Neolithic civilisation from 7000-6000 BC.

Although works in this series are named after specific sites, they are not representations of them; the techniques and materials Stella is using though - sand casting and found object - are suggestive of the archeological process. Extraordinary conglomerations of found rusted metal and cast aluminium up to 2.5 meters across, these wall sculptures are mounted on a ring, which allows them to be rotated and displayed at any angle.

Media

• Painting
• Other

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