DISPATCHES
ART, MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE, FILM, SHOPPING, NEWS AND THINGS TO MAKE AND DO… ART, MUSIC, ARCHITECT
FIRST TO ARRIVE: FRANK STELLA
‘Late work’ is a concept in desperate
need of theoretical attention, especially
for a figure such as Frank Stella.
For many art historians still in thrall
to the upheavals of formalist criticism
in the 1960s, the bulk of Stella’s
art is ‘late’. After 16 Americans at
MoMA (1959), after the Black Paintings
– perhaps even after the shaped canvases,
and the irregular polygons, but
definitely after the striped canvases –
the deed was done. Stella’s contribution
arrived early and aggressively; it drank
the booze, insulted the host and dropped
its cigarette in your martini on the way
to the door, but it was undeniable:
art would be different, but it would
leave Stella’s art behind.
Enter the hangover of the 1970s, 80s
and 90s: “What is he doing?” “Look at
all that garish colour!” “Is that…
relief?” In retrospect, however, I think
that hangover will be seen as our own.
Intoxicated with his innovations of the
1960s, we were unable to acknowledge the
rigorous formal aesthetic thinking that
Stella’s work has continuously put on
display. It helps, too, that his most
recent work has either synthesised those
previous decades’ achievements, or broken
with them. Beginning in 2002 Stella took
to a far more curvilinear, free-form but
pared down kind of three-dimensional work
which, though quickly identifiable as
sculptural, continued to exhibit certain
strictly pictorial elements, such as the
fluid trusses which served to structure
many of these newer pieces.
New materials made their entrance as
well: carbon fibre, fibreglass and, in
the most recent work on view this month
at Kasmin, nylon and foam. Perhaps there
is something of the younger, materialist
K.125, 2007, stainless steel tubing, nylon RPT, “I tried to keep the paint as good as it
155 x 76 x 25 cm. Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York was in the can” Stella staging a return
here – a return that would seem to state
that the ‘late work’ is yet to come.
Jonathan T.D. Neil
FRANK STELLA, 11 MAY – 6 JULY
PAUL KASMIN GALLERY, NEW YORK
WWW.PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM
ARTREVIEW four.linzero.lin
p 31-40 Dispatches AR May07.indd40 40 30/3/07 12:17:54
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