Frank Stella: Recent Sculpture
Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York NY
Through April 20, 2024

That Frank Stella’s work is idea driven is a given. Since graduating from Princeton and settling at New York in 1957, Mr. Stella has been an intellectual painter first and foremost. His demeanor may be playfully bold, irreverent, and even humorous at times. His focus, however, has always been the formal ideas behind painting, and his art devoted to an intrepid exploration of painting’s constituent elements. Mr. Stella’s work, behind its broad shiny pastiche of elements and abstruse titles, shout “ideas, Ideas, Ideas.” 

In this current show of five massive new pieces at Jeffrey Deitch, Mr. Stella’s ideas have metastasized to the point they nearly devour the space. These new works — Mr. Deitch’s commodious Wooster gallery could only accommodate five of them — are veritable vortexes of nested form and color towering more than 20 feet in the air. Resting either on industrial metal casters or hanging from structural support bars, they are three-dimensional assemblages of curved steel, fiberglass, and aluminum quite unlike anything he has done before. For someone who has produced as much as he has, this is saying a lot. 

What we have, it seems, are massive, exploded paintings. It’s as if Mr. Stella has taken the formal elements of his earlier two-dimensional work, thrown them into a blender, and cast the result. These works are in fact based on sketches which are then rendered on computer. They are then sent to be fabricated in ship building factories in Europe, the only facilities capable of engineering components at such scale. Once returned, they are assembled in Mr. Stella’s hangar sized studio North of Manhattan, where they are bolted together and painted with industrial and automotive paint. 

The results are unprecedented, if not baffling, art objects that confront us with a “what if” scenario. What if we were able to separate the paint from a painting’s surface and swirl them around in pure space? What if we were able, as Mr. Stella says himself, to “Build a painting” instead of merely paint it? 

The work escapes a clear formal designation for this reason, even as they are designated as sculpture. To call them sculptures would mean that they somehow respond to the space they occupy. Yet their eerily smooth, almost three-dimensional printed quality, together with their iridescent and glossy surfaces, give them a hyper Platonic purity that eschews embodiment and is closer to the painted surface. You are drawn into the cyclone of each work rather than left standing outside it. To view these works is to become engulfed by them. 

Mr. Stella, however, has never been concerned with corporeality in this sense. He is more fascinated by a painting’s conceptual elements, the ideas, and here they are delineated while hanging together in space. In this sense, these gargantuan works signify a logical summit of his 60-year career. 

Even so, he leaves traces of his earlier work. In the “Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick” series that occupies the main floor, the middle — K. 144 — has a multi- colored pinwheel nested in its heart, a direct reference to the motif in his earlier painting. In this iteration, however, the arms of the pinwheel extend, stretch, and then loop around. In the two pieces from the “Atlantic Salmon Rivers” series, we see the abstracted idea of a fish expressed as a long, fluid loops of salmon colored fiberglass, a squiggly motif that has appeared in his earlier work many times before. 

Even so, we are looking at something unprecedented here, a new way of extending visual ideas through space, and Mr. Stella seems to be having great fun doing it. 

Few artists have been as restlessly, or relentlessly, inventive as Mr. Stella. First enshrined in modern art history as the prophet who led the NY School out of the wilderness and into post painterly abstraction, he has continued to surprise, confound, and even irritate critics with his continuously evolving and immense body of work.

He is also the subject of certain stubborn myths that misread the long arc of his career. It is often said that Mr. Stella suddenly changed his style mid-career, shifting from minimalism to maximalism. This, however, is to miss the point. In truth, he has shown remarkable consistency, if you follow his stubborn insistence on formal exploration pursued to its logical conclusions, no matter how surprising the results may be. 

They begin with Mr. Stella’s reset of the painterly surface to ground zero with his ultra-flat black paintings of 1958, a ferocious — and funny — negation of the gestural abstraction that dominated painting before him. He then began to add elements: form, pattern, color, extensiveness, dimensionality.

He started by painting geometric lines and shapes until his canvases morphed into circles and rhombuses. He slowly added color, subdued hues in synthetic polymer paint. The color becomes increasingly vibrant and the shapes more amorphous. Randomized squiggles, computer-generated elements, sculptural elements, iridescence, and glitter followed. 

Which takes us to this present show. Say what you will about the programmatic zaniness of his execution, you can’t accuse Mr. Stella of not having a vision. At 87, an age where most could contentedly retire, especially after shifting the course of modern art history, his continued alacrity and monumental drive are a gift.