Frank Stella: New Work

FreedmanArt is pleased to present newly created work by Frank Stella. 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 three- dimensional 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…”