ART CITIES:Dubai-Frank Stella

Frank Stella emerged on the scene in the late ‘50s, when his M “Black Paintings” heralded a new era in postwar art. In the years since then, he has worked consistently in series, pioneering new approaches to form, color, narrative, and abstraction with innovative paintings, prints, sculptures, and architectural installations. With a career extended across more than half a century, Stella both holds an important place in the history of American art and maintains contemporary relevance as his work continues to influence younger generations of artists.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Leila Heller Gallery Archive

Six large-scale, high-relief works by Frank Stella are on presentation at Leila Heller Gallery Dubai, this collection of works represents Stella’s heroic refutation of the moribund dialogue of the death of painting and refusal of the spiritualist discourse of abstraction. First rising to international recognition with his early series of “Black Paintings” (1958-60), which founded the discourse of minimalism from the ‘60s onward, by the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Frank Stella pursued a practice to push the limits of the pictorial, exploding the bounds of the canvas in high-relief works which strove to paint without painting. On a 1983 trip to Malta, Stella was influenced by the isle’s fortified architecture. The resulting Malta series, of which “Zejtun” (1983) is part, and the “Blyvoors” (1982), are composed in honeycombed aluminum, continuing the artist’s previous use of metal forms to effectively attempt to both address and move beyond the bounds of painting. Also on display, “Giufa E La Berreta Rossa” (1985) along with “La Scienza della Fiacca”  (1984) are each seminal expressions of Stella’s willful rejection of the common conceit that abstraction necessarily commands reduction; rather in a gesture towards narrative allusion in literalist space, here Stella presents dynamic studies in the limits of pictorial form. Both works belong to Stella’s “Cones and Pillars” series (1984-1987), a bricolage of cyclical projections whose movement and instability is underlined by the continuous perspectival redirection of each collaged form. Stella’s heroic “Moby Dick” series (1986-1997), represented here in the mixed media maquette, “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (1991), one of several hundred works completed by Stella representing the 135 chapters of Melville’s classic narrative. As though a metaphor for Stella’s own Ahab-like unrelenting struggle against mythical weight of abstraction’s limits as well as the limits of the picture plane, these physical, gestural works reveal a composition of ever more organic, dynamic forms.

Info: Leila Heller Gallery, I-87, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, Duration: 13/10/16-4/1/17, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.leilahellergallery.com