Art & Antiques Magazine
by John Dorfman
October 1, 2013
This month, when the Museum of Arts and Design in New York opens its show “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital”—the first by a major museum to examine “the increasingly important role of digital fabrication in contemporary art, architecture and design practice”—among the more than 80 artists represented in it will be Frank Stella. It might seem strange to some that an artist who started out in the 1950s and had a retrospective at MoMA as early as 1970 would be making work with 3-D printing technology just like some straight-out-of-art-school kid, but to those familiar with Stella’s protean nature and taste for boundary-pushing, it makes complete sense. Having first attracted attention with flatter-than-flat hard-edged paintings, Stella has been steadily expanding into space ever since, beginning with low relief and collage and proceeding to curved canvases, paintings with projecting sculpture-like elements, and out-and-out sculpture—although Stella prefers to think of his free-standing works as paintings in three dimensions or “sculptural paintings,” rather than sculptures.