Frank Stella

Galerie Terminus, Munich
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the catalogue illustration fails to fully convey some of the neon elements visible in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All of the elements are stable. Extremely close inspection reveals a few minute and unobtrusive chips to the thicker paint along some of the extreme outer edges as well as a few thin and shallow isolated scratches. All other surface irregularities appear to be original. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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After shooting to fame at the early age of 25 with his ‘Black Paintings’, Frank Stella has gone on to be one of the most revered post-war American artists still practicing today. Heralded as a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction and later cited as having given rise to the minimalist art movement, Stella’s artistic output has continued to produce increasingly complicated and dynamic work. The current lot, Pitchpoling, forms part of a series central to Stella’s later career based on the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. A swirling mass of vibrant colour and energetic form, this work represents the creative ingenuity that has allowed Stella’s artistic practice to constantly evolve, both conceptually and physically.

In 1959 Stella gained early and immediate recognition for his series of reduced, abstract and impersonal striped black paintings. These signified an opposing stream of abstraction from the gestural brushwork of abstract expressionism that was prevalent in the United States (and in New York where Stella was living) at the time. Focusing on the formal elements of art-making, Stella chose to create work which had no underlying meanings, emotions, or narratives. He used the basic principles of line, space, volume and shape to mould an artwork that completely dismantled the devices of three-dimensional illusionism. Over time, Stella’s practice began to evolve, starting by incorporating colour and shaping his canvases in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s he had introduced collage to his works and they gradually become more and more sculptural in form. Eventually his works became a fascinating amalgamation of painting and sculpture as his practice became more experimental and diverse, showing the true extent of his development from those early ‘Black Paintings’. “When people ask me why I stopped making black paintings, it’s like asking Kodak why they stopped using film. You move on, the world moves on, it’s very hard to not go with the flow. You’d have to have a really good reason to resist.” (N. Sayej, ‘Frank Stella: ‘If you get into art to make money, you’re deluded’,’ The Guardian, London, September 2015).

In the 1980’s, Stella embarked upon one of the most significant series of works of his late career. Taking inspiration from the novel which has since come to be known as a legendary literature tale; Stella created over 130 aluminium wall-reliefs, each one named after a different chapter in the novel. Pitchpoling takes its name from the 84^th chapter of the novel where Stubb uses a small harpoon to ‘pitchpole’ a whale; piercing it a number of times until it perishes. In this work the curves, geometric shapes and lines intersect to create an upheaval of colour and sculptural form that convey the dangerous uncertainty of the seas. A profusion of shapes that protrude beyond the confines of a canvas, Stella describes how this series illustrates the most important aspects of abstraction for him as an artist. “Abstraction in the 20^th century is dependent on cubism, which is arranging planes in space, but the planes are arranged in a kind of stiff and geometric kind of way. Once the planes begin to bend and curve and deform then you get what happens in Moby Dick – it’s a way of opening things up for abstraction” (J. Jones, ‘The Prince of Whales,’ The Guardian, London, April 2001).