Beschreibung:

FRANK STELLA (B. 1936)Plutusia IV 1995 signed and dated '95 acrylic, resin, fiberglass and molded paper 50 3/4 by 51 1/2 by 2 in. 128.9 by 130.8 by 5.1 cm. FootnotesProvenance Knoedler & Company, New York Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1997 Exhibited New York, Knoedler & Company, FRANK STELLA Imaginary Places: New Paintings & Prints, 1995-1996 Widely considered to be one of the most influential and pioneering living American artists, Frank Stella was initially drawn to painting as a way of exploring abstraction and challenging the limits of form and space when he moved to New York City in 1958. Reacting to the painterly techniques of Abstract Expressionism that had dominated the contemporary art discourse for the past decade, Stella's earliest black paintings in the late 1950s explored the flatness of the canvas and helped pave the way for Minimalism. This interest in the physicality of the work and a rejection of illusion gradually led him to experiment with shaped canvases, that in turn emphasised the necessity to incorporate relief elements in his work. With sharp peaks and voluminous swirls 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 in: Marc Louis Filippone, The Creation of Frank Stella's Large Scale Sculptures, www.artsy.com, 29 April 2013). The present work, Plutusia IV from 1995 explores these forays into the three-dimensional realm. Constructed in acrylic, resin, fiberglass and molded paper, the circular outline holds a topographical landscape of colour and shapes. The title evokes the novel Goddess of Atvatabar by William Richard Bradshaw, a great work of fantastical adventure of the discovery of a world within our world called 'Plutusia'. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century fantastical tales of other worlds and times gripped the imaginations of the reading public, and the masterful works of authors such as Jules Verne, Rice Burroughs, Haggard and Howard propelled the authors to public recognition and their works to long-lasting popularity. Often recognised as one of the finest examples of its kind, the enticing and other-worldly land of Goddess of Atvatabar might have gripped Frank Stella's imagination. Whilst his work is neither abstract nor representational in the conventional sense, the artist is no stranger to literal references in his oeuvre. In his Cones and Pillars series from the 1980s – examples of which reside in the Tate Collection, London (Salta nel mio Sacco, 1984), the National Gallery of Art, Washington (La scienza della fiacca, 1984), and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (La vecchia dell'orto, 1986) - the artist titled all works after a 1956 collection of short stories of Italian fables by Italo Calvino. In the present work, we seem to be getting a glimpse into the world within a world as imagined by Stella, a world full of colour, shape, texture and wonder. Frank Stella has been the subject of multiple career retrospectives, most notably at the MoMA in 1970 where, at just thirty-three years old, he was the youngest artist ever to have a retrospective at the museum. Other significant exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, the Hayward Gallery, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, as well as having works held in major institutional collections around the world such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Collection, London; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. In 2010, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Frank Stella's enduring appeal as an unquestionable master of his craft makes