Installation view of “Homage to Frank Stella” at Mnuchin Gallery, New York. © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.
by Karen Wilkin
Karen Wilkin reviews Homage to Frank Stella for The New Criterion.
She writes, "it is difficult to believe that Frank Stella (1936–2024) is no longer with us. For six and a half decades, beginning with the first exhibitions of his implacable Black Paintings in 1959, when he was twenty-three, he was a powerful presence, an unignorable, demanding artist who made us all—including other artists—question our most cherished assumptions about what a painting could be. Like his friend the British sculptor Anthony Caro, who said that repeating the same thing was 'too boring,' Stella refused to settle for what he had already discovered. Instead, from the start he restlessly explored the implications of whatever he had done, shifting emphases and often destroying the expectations his previous work had raised. Over the years, Stella ignored the established separation between two and three dimensions, flouted the convention of the canvas as a flat rectangle, and even tested the limits of “taste.” He questioned his own early works’ assertion that a painting was a monochrome surface, substituting raucous, multilayered, violently polychrome constructions that project into the viewer’s space or come completely off the wall. And to complicate things, these formal and conceptual adventures were enhanced or perhaps even provoked by new technologies and materials."