By Brian P. Kelly
While the shows at Zwirner and Cohan focus on a single monumental work to celebrate a late artist, Mnuchin Gallery takes a different approach with its laudatory mini-retrospective “Homage to Frank Stella.” Stella, who died in May and was a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction and minimalism, is represented here by nearly 30 works that span his career from 1958 to 2023.
Included are examples of his early “Black Paintings,” monochrome canvases whose faint lines create uneasy voids that seem ominously seductive. Here too are shaped canvases like “Telluride,” a T form represented in two different scales, one intimate and approachable, the other imposingly large. His protractor series of the late ’60s gets one inclusion, and his turn toward more maximalist, three-dimensional wall sculptures starting in the 1970s is present as well, with “Maha-lat, 5.5x” (1978-79) from his “Indian Bird” series and “Norisring” (1982) from the “Circuit” series. Later in his career, Stella leaned even more fully into sculpture, and the futuristic, almost alien objects here—“boeta” (2004) seems to have gilded a shooting star with stainless steel; “Knutange” (1992) is a frilly yet dangerous-looking flowerlike hunk of metal; “K.179” (2011), with its whipping flagella in an array of colors, seems ready to slither across the room—reveal his continuous exploration of form, even at a point in his career where he could have simply repeated his earlier successes and still won acclaim. It’s an impressive exhibition that simultaneously makes one mourn the creator’s passing while celebrating his many—and varied—achievements.