The Wall Street Journal
Sculpting Sound: Stella Riffs on Scarlatti Sonatas, by Kelly Crow
Saturday/Sunday, June 30 - July 1, 2012
New York artist Frank Stella’s new sculptures come with their own soundtrack.
Mr. Stella rose to fame a half-century ago by painting pinstripes on canvases cut to look like geometric shapes—a move that helped push postwar art beyond the roiling brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism toward the flatter simplicity of Minimalism. He later created prints and sculptures that explore ideas of geometric abstraction.
PRESS RELEASE
Frank Stella: New Work
April 20, 2012
The gallery is pleased to present newly created work by Frank Stella for our upcoming exhibition, opening on Thursday May 17, 2012. Frank Stella, widely acclaimed as one of America’s most original, influential, and inventive artists, continues to explore and forge new ground with his most recent relief sculpture, the Scarlatti Kirkpatrick series, initiated in 2006. This bold new chapter, in an exceptional six-decade career, was inspired by the harpsichord sonatas of eighteenth-century Italian composer, Dominico Scarlatti, and the writings of twentieth-century American musicologist, Ralph Kirkpatrick.
The Wall Street Journal
From an Abstract Giant to None, by James Panero
July 6, 2012
What does music look like? A century ago, the Theosophists, an esoteric group that influenced the early modernists, believed they could see colors floating above performances of Mendelssohn, Gounod and Wagner. The look of music drove Wassily Kandinsky to experiment with abstraction.
The New York Times
Frank Stella : ‘New Work’, by Roberta Smith
July 5, 2012
It takes awhile to appreciate the sheer formal intelligence of Frank Stella’s hyperactive polychrome wall pieces. Their spiraling forms, shot through with hairpin and curving rods of thin painted tubing, are inspired by the pell-mell music of Scarlatti and the crisp complexities of late Kandinsky. If you look closely, many of them feature ribbons of color that twist and ripple outward from one or two central points: configurations that might almost have been lifted from earlier Stella stripe paintings, unleashed into three dimensions.
Bloomberg
Perfume Bottle Nudes Inspire Stella’s Process: Interview, by James Tarmy
July 24, 2012
Wearing an old brown fedora, a shirt decorated with a marlin and rumpled khakis, Frank Stella, 76, walks through his show at the FreedmanArt Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.
On view is a selection of his recent sculptures. Abstract and candy colored, with intricate frames suspended on metal armature, they were created through a process called rapid prototyping.
artcritical
Frank Stella Evolves: The Scarlatti Series at Freedman Art, by Piri Halasz
Monday, August 20, 2012
Ernst Häckel’s famous theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the development of an organism, that is to say, mirrors the evolution of the species – applies to Frank Stella in relation to Western art since the Middle Ages. His severe but elegant “pinstripe” paintings of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, together with the gentler aluminum and bronze paintings that succeeded them, can be seen as his Quattrocento period (and, not surprisingly, won much praise when a group of all three series was shown at L & M Arts earlier this year).