ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Frank Stella

Frank Stella has played a major role in the development of American Abstraction during the 20th Century. During his nearly 60-year career, Stella has explored the possibilities of abstraction in paintings, sculpture, and prints that push the conventions of each medium beyond its assumed limits. Though often inspired by literature, music, science, and history, his art is never illustrative; he insists that each of his works contains all the information necessary to understand it. His ultimate goal is to reinvigorate painting by inventing a new kind of pictorial space.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

The selection of works by Frank Stella that are on presentation at his solo exhibition “Recent works” at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles highlights the artist’s ongoing experimentation with spatial representation and includes the début of a new painting series. Frank Stella’s recent work offers viewers a remarkable and confounding visual experience. Since the 1990s, the artist has worked with computer renderings of complex forms, piecing together compositions from recurring motifs inspired by smoke rings, a spiral-coiled hat, stars, and other visual phenomena. Though Stella conceives of all his works in relation to painting, they often extend into three dimensions and are inspired by various disciplines, including literature, philosophy, and music. “The Broken Jug. A Comedy [D#3] (left handed version)” (2007) takes its title from the German Romanticist writer and theorist, Heinrich von Kleist, whose texts Stella has engaged with for twenty years. Ribbons of wood weave in and out of each other in graceful arcs, flowing dynamically over viewers as they walk around the piece. Three additional sculptures illustrate the artist’s diverse approaches to the star form, which has figured prominently in his work since 2014. Stella’s stars at times appear weightless, dissolving into bands of stainless steel; elsewhere, their mass is tangible and echoes the weighty reality of celestial bodies. “Summer Star (Net)” (2015), moreover, exhibits the process of rapid prototyping (RPT) that the artist has used for many years to develop intricate arrangements of vibrantly colored plastics and metals. The title, and original source of inspiration “Scarlatti K” series that began in 2006, is far from contemporary. Stella took the name from the 18^th Century baroque composer Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti and the 20^th Century American musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick who catalogued Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas chronologically giving each one a “K” number. Rather than attempting a literal translation of Scarlatti’s compositions, Stella’s series instead evokes the “sense of rhythm and movement that you get in music” as the artist says. In “K.404” (2013), for example, a spray of yellow needle-like protrusions suggests staccato notes and an upbeat tempo, and metal parabolas trace meandering melodic lines. On view for the first time, Stella’s recent paintings mark the artist’s return to the canvas, with compositions that relate directly to his three-dimensional investigations. Each one features a painstakingly rendered, undulating form that hovers in space, casting painted shadows onto the picture plane below. With the look of architectural plans, computerized models, and diagrams, the figures seem to defy gravity, as if designed for some otherworldly location or enigmatic purpose. Sensuous and inviting, these new works offer insight into Stella’s long-standing conception of painting as a multidimensional, multidisciplinary enterprise.

Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 14/9-26/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://spruethmagers.com