Frank Stella
Frank Stella ( born May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts) is an American painter, sculptor, and object artist. He is one of the representatives of the analytical painting, Hard Edge and Color Field painting.
Life and work
Frank Stella attended from 1950 to 1954, the Phillips Academy in Andover High School, where he made the acquaintance of the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton filmmaker. After finishing school, he studied from 1954 to 1958 at Princeton University in New Jersey; incidentally, he took painting classes at William C. Seitz and Stephen Greene. After graduating as a Bachelor's degree in history in 1958, he moved to New York. In 1961 he married the art historian and critic Barbara Rose.
Starting from informal ductus of action painting and the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline to Stella sought a " quieter ", meditative imagery, which he found in the color surfaces of Barnett Newman and in the so -called target Paintings by Jasper Johns soon. Particularly impressed by Mark Rothko, he arrived in the consequence to an ever-increasing geometrization of form and reduce the color.
Public sensation reached Stella by its provocative theming and reception of Nazi set pieces with titles such as precarious work makes you free (1958), the entrance theme of the Auschwitz concentration camp or the flag high! (1959 ), named after the first verse the Horst Wessel song. Stella used in this work, which he called the Black Paintings, a similar geometry, as has happened in the symbolism of the terrorist regime, avoided by the rejection of color, however, possible associations. In 1959, the progressive gallery owner Leo Castelli was aware of the young Stella and took him into his catalog. In 1960, the first solo exhibition in the " Leo Castelli Gallery " in New York.
From 1960, Stella began to experiment with arbitrarily shaped image carrier on which he - in contrast to the 1958 resulting series of Black Paintings - ordered regular, now interrupted by white space, colored lines. He overcame the "classic" image format. This series he described as shaped canvases, so as " shaped canvases " because it ignored the traditional rectangular screen size and abolished the apparent limitation of the two-dimensional painting by the component of the space. With this new and unusual fusion of painting and sculpture, he became the co-founder of a new conception of art. In addition to a wide range of colors, he worked in the following years with L-, N-, U - and T- shaped arrangements, until he came to completely irregular, winding arrangements, the so-called Irregular polygon ( from 1965). From 1967-71, the Protractor Series was created ( = Protractor Protractor ). Here Stella worked with semi-circular, color- range arrangements that are reminiscent of color circles. 1961, during his first trip to Europe, Stella had his first European solo exhibition at the "Galerie Lawrence " in Paris. Together with Henry Geldzahler 1963 he undertook a journey to Persia.
At times, Stella returned late 1960s, back to the limitations of the square format and experimented in works such as Sunset Beach (1967 ) with spectrally arranged areas of color to achieve an optical depth effect. He was similar in the visual language of his older contemporaries Kenneth Noland. End of the 1960s emerged with the series Gemini ( 1967) also first lithographs. He used aluminum and copper colors in some of these works. In collaboration with Merce Cunningham Stella, designed stage sets. In 1968 he participated in the documenta 4 in Kassel; 1970 was followed by a first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art
With the series Polish Villages ( 1971-73 ) took Stella a style and technical change: The assemblage came to the fore, with the large-scale, three-dimensional works in their language of materials ( engineered wood, cardboard, metal, etc.) increasingly architectural models or reliefs were similar. In 1972, Frank Stella participated in the Biennale of Venice, in 1977 participation in the documenta 6 in Kassel. During the 1970s, Stella left his minimalist visual language and turned to the visual maximalism to: Its forms were " baroque ", curvy, dynamic and plastic. This " calculated - arbitrary " style, which he developed in mid -1980, should he retained until well into the 1990s, he finally took the step to large-scale public sculpture. In 1982 he was represented at the group exhibition Zeitgeist. As of 1990, Stella dealt favored with the architectural implementation of his works. His concept for the design of a Kunsthalle in Dresden in 1991 was not realized. 1992-93 he designed the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, 1996, the Foyer in new construction of the Hamburg Axel - Springer -Haus. 2001 Stella's monumental sculpture Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, A play, 3X on the northeast side of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC positioned.
Frank Stella lives in Manhattan, New York.
Reception
Stella looked at first to reduce to a minimum. He declared himself as follows: " All I want to know taken from my pictures ... is that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. " Establishing his pictures not based on geometric measure relations as Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly or Josef Albers. In contrast to these images his work with the all-over painting, a principle which he continually repeated in its early Black Paintings, to the painted lines are reaching the limits of the canvas and even " left " end of the 1960s the canvas.
The art historian Karin Thomas writes about Stella's color field painting: " At Stella reach the space scale properties of the individual colors as they have already been recognized by Auguste Herbin, to develop freely, so that divide the color areas in different spatial zones. " With the images of " black series ", which originated from between the fall of 1958 and spring of 1960, 21, Stella passed definitively to the 'fundamental principle of European image organization, the process of composing. " These images tend to object sticking. The image is no longer representation but thing.