| Artist: | Frank Stella |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Shard IV [The Shards series] | |
| Date: | 1982 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
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| Subject: part of the Shards series; Stella is working here with the leftovers; the early geometry gives way to irregular curves and an allover pattern that looks like Pollock eating spaghetti. Stella here opens up his "working space," proving himself to be more a structuralist than a Minimalist. Style: painterly metal reliefs that create a space that projects outward rather than staying literally flat or falling back into fictive, illusionistic depths; color and curves bring a new vitality and energy that makes the work freer than the earlier geometric designs. Context: Stella's Minimalism evolving in new directions so as not to get trapped within its own illusions or repetitive dead ends; opens up his "working space" to include the painterly and the gestural; moves forward rather than backward, like Caravaggio who moved on past Renaissance perspective by projecting forward into a Baroque stagelike space. Good example of how Stella approaches painting as a problem solver, looking for ways to expand boundaries and the possibilites of pictorial space. While geometry controlled the earlier work, here he becomes more improvisational and freewheeling in his irregular curves, like engineering run amuck. Creating and articulating a viable new space following what he calls the crisis of modernism and abstraction's "entrappment in flatness." The "Shards" series explores projective relief space and a looser, more expressive style; Stella always on the lookout for a way out of the dead end through a re-structuring of pictorial space. | ||
