Frank Stella

William Pall Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

"Beginning with the Exotic Birds, there is a sense of expansiveness–a confidence and freedom–in Stella's art that stands alone in the abstract painting of the seventies and eighties. Free now of the pervasive a priori planning demanded by the seriality of the stripe paintings, Stella could enjoy the painterly execution of the metal reliefs in a more spontaneous way. The mood of Stella's work becomes, for the first time, exuberant. And the sense of the painter as homo ludens established in these pictures has persisted to the present."

William Rubin, Frank Stella: 1970-1987, Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 77

Hailing from Frank Stella’s pivotal Exotic Bird series, Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon is a celebration of both the gestural use of color and the radical freedom of curvature. As described by William Rubin, esteemed scholar and MoMA curator, “[with this series] we enter fully into Stella’s ‘second career,‘” a transition that was “radical on the levels both of method and of pictorial language.” In the early 1970s, Stella fundamentally shifted the focus of his artmaking, moving away from the minimalist nature of his earlier works in favor of a more maximalist, exuberant style. As such, characterized by freewheeling curves and flamboyant colors, the Exotic Bird series was a departure from the precise, rectilinear geometry that defined Stella’s earlier output. By abandoning any adherence to strict geometric order, Stella’s Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon epitomizes a confident and imaginative spontaneity. 

Prompted by his various travels and newfound interest in bird-watching, Frank Stella’s aptly titled Exotic Bird series occupied his artistic output from 1976 to 1980. With the embrace of curves and linear forms derived from draftsman's tools, Stella methodically constructed his structural compositions, ultimately giving “a corporeal pictorial presence to an abstract idea” (William Rubin, Frank Stella: 1970-1987, Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 79). As noted by the artist himself, while this series may look like a radical departure from his earlier works, his sense of structure and equilibrium remains the same. Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon serves as testament to both the conceptual rigor and material freedom of this highly coveted but ultimately short-lived series.