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Lot 15W
Frank Stella(American, born 1936)Fall, 1990
15 May 2019, 17:00 EDT
New YorkUS$120,000 - US$180,000
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Frank Stella (American, born 1936)
Fall, 1990
mixed media on aluminum
47 1/4 x 29 x 27 in.
120 x 73.7 x 68.6 cm.
This work was executed in 1990.
mixed media on aluminum
47 1/4 x 29 x 27 in.
120 x 73.7 x 68.6 cm.
This work was executed in 1990.
Footnotes
Provenance
Private Collection, Japan
Private Collection, New York
Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Upon moving to New York City in 1958, Frank Stella was initially drawn to painting as a way of exploring abstraction and challenging the limits of form and space. Reacting to the painterly techniques of the Abstract Expressionists that had dominated the contemporary art climate for the past decade, Stella's earliest black paintings in the late 1950s explored Minimalism and the flatness of the canvas. This interest in the physicality of the work and a rejection of illusion lead him to experiment with shaped canvases, resulting in the rich colors and complex forms of the Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series.
The sculptural impression created by these pieces naturally lead Stella to incorporate relief elements in his work, which began to take on a three-dimensionality. With sharp peaks breaking away from the wall and emergent shapes challenging the pictorial space, these initial works from the 1970s challenged the notion of sculpture itself. Though they are hung from a wall in the traditional way of a painting, their three-dimensional nature allows for the work to be read as a sculpture. As such, Stella, remarked "a sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere" (the artist quoted in: Marc Louis Filippone, The Creation of Frank Stella's Large Scale Sculptures, www.artsy.com, 29 April 2013).
The present work, Fall, 1990, is one such medium bending example by Stella. Constructed in aluminum, the spiraling form appears to explode off the wall in a dizzying bang. A kinetic cyclone of color rips through the shimmering swathes of silver shapes, in a dynamic flurry. Like a genie escaping from a bottle, the work propels off the wall, almost organic in its capturing of movement, color and light. A mature, confident example of the artist's experiments with sculpture, it is a stunning example of how Stella has consistently explored the limits of spatial abstraction throughout his career and gives further credence to his reputation as arguably America's most important living artist.
Born in 1936 in Massachusetts, Stella was given his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970. At just thirty-three years old, this made him the youngest artist ever to have a retrospective at the museum. Since then, he has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, the Hayward Gallery, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Stella's work can be found in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Broad, Los Angeles. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2010.
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