 |
The gallery is pleased to present newly created work by Frank Stella for our upcoming
exhibition, opening on Thursday May 17, 2012. Frank Stella, widely acclaimed as one of
America’s most original, influential, and inventive artists, continues to explore and forge
new ground with his most recent relief sculpture, the Scarlatti Kirkpatrick series, initiated
in 2006. This bold new chapter, in an exceptional six-decade career, was inspired by the
harpsichord sonatas of eighteenth-century Italian composer, Dominico Scarlatti, and the
writings of twentieth-century American musicologist, Ralph Kirkpatrick.
The earlier Scarlatti works were the subject of a special exhibition, “Stella Sounds” exhibited
in tandem with “Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting With White Border,” at
The Phillips Collection, Washington, d.c., last June 2011. The exhibition explored various
connections between the works of these two giants of abstract art; the sweeping threedimensional
forms of color provide Stella’s painterly approach, and have their antecedents
in the art of Wassily Kandinsky.
Stella’s new sculptural works are made from lightweight resin, with swirling multi-colored
polychrome forms coiled with steel tubing armatures. The dynamic sculptures, with their
complex centers, travel through space, evocative of the colorful sounds and rhythms of
Scarlatti’s music.
In this new exploration of abstraction, Stella’s constructions claim hold of their immediate
space in a manner recalling many of the formal characteristics of Baroque art, compositional
forms which he has been engaged with in his own painting, sculpture and architecture. In
comments about the work of this series, Stella remarked:
“If you follow the edges of the lines, there’s a sense of movement, and when they
move well and the color follows, they become colorful, and that’s what happens
in the Scarlatti—it builds up and it moves...”
We also wish to inform you that
Professor Dr. Markus Bruderlin,
Director of Kunstmuseum,
Wolfsburg in Germany is organizing
Frank Stella—The Retrospective
Works, 1956–2012, an
in-depth exhibition of more
than seventy works opening
September 8, 2012.
For further information please
contact Sallie Wiggins at
sallie@freedmanart.com.
|
