“Odeslk I”, 1971, Frank Stella at Sprüth Magers. Image courtesy of the artist & Sprüth Magers
Back in the 1970s Frank Stella created “Polish Village”, a modernist series that explores the representation of synagogues destroyed by the Nazis in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Since the beginning of Stella’s career, he has been admired for his uncomplicated views on what art is and what it represents. “You don’t look at ‘Polish Villages’ as abstract paintings, you think of them as a problem,” said Stella. “You have to look at it and see what the point of it is”. His point in exploring three-dimensional reliefs relates to painting, sculpture and architecture, which the artist thinks is what art-making is about. In the series, each relief is named after a now non-existent village, which is something that encouraged Stella to deepen his original approach of reshaping canvases to then paint and cover with two-dimensional collages. His persistent investigations gave the works in “Polish Village” a three-dimensional scope, making this post-war series a turning point in his career.
This series is also currently on show in Berlin alongside the “Bali” series. The American painter and printmaker specifically selected these two projects in order to merge two distinctive geographies, times, and styles in one single space and time. Composed of large-scale, geometric paintings and spatial sculptures, both sets of works explore materiality and texture while pushing the limits of two-dimensional space by juxtaposing 3D geometric shapes or breaking up the canvases’ original mould.
In “Bali” the artist found inspiration through anthropological images he sourced from Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s studies about Balinese children. The works made in the Noughties display immense contemporaneity and his affinity with relief-making. The curvilinear forms Stella produced for this series are reminiscent of human poses, and by arbitrarily using materials found throughout the island he aims to show us what the locals see everyday.
At the exhibition in Sprüth Magers Berlin the pieces exhibited – though from two distinctly different periods in the artist’s oeuvre – create a cohesion that accentuates his progression, while challenging the notions of time and space, which have turned Stella into a household name in abstract art.
(Left) “Gisiang”, 2007, by Frank Stella, at Sprüth Magers. Photo by: Joshua White, 2016. (Right) “Olkienniki III”, 1972, by Frank Stella at Sprüth Magers. Image courtesy of the artist & Sprüth Magers
“Frank Stella” is on display at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, until 3 September