Haunch of Venison London presents Frank Stella: Connections, the most extensive exhibition of Stella’s work in the UK to date. This exhibition examines Stella’s long and extraordinarily diverse career and includes works from 1958 to the present day. On view through 19 NOV 2011.
Frank Stella, Cantahar, 1998. Mixed media on canvas, 396 x 396 cm © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2011. Collection of the artist courtesy Haunch of Venison. Photo: John Bodkin.
Frank Stella (born 1936) is unarguably one of the most important and influential American artists of the last fifty years. His work transcends boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture and in the course of a five-decade career the artist has continually reinvented himself, always seeking new challenges. Frank Stella: Connections brings together a careful selection of two and three dimensional work in broad thematic groupings which will explore Stella’s concerns – with planes and surfaces, space and relief, colour and movement, and the limits of reresentation. Within a broad chronology, the exhibition offers surprising and revealing shifts backwards and forwards in time so as to create encounters, juxtapositions and dialogues between works from different series, in order to explore the underlying concerns and extraordinary consistency of Stella’s practice. It is now 25 years since Stella’s exhibition at the ICA, the last time his work was seen in depth in London.
Frank Stella: Connections creates a critical context for a reappraisal of Stella’s work in London, and generate a renewed understanding of the breadth of this ground-breaking artist’s extraordinary achievements. The exhibition includes previously unseen early Minimalist works, and examples from major series such as the ‘Irregular Polygons’ and ‘Protractor’ paintings of the 1960s, the ‘Polish Village’ series, the ‘Circuits’ and ‘Cone and Pillar’ series of the 1970s and 1980s, and the metal reliefs and monumental floor sculptures he has made in the last two decades.
Frank Stella: Connections is organised by Haunch of Venison in collaboration with FreedmanArt, New York . In 2012 the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg will host Frank Stella – The Retrospective: Works 1956-2012. In 2014-15 a major retrospective curated by Michael Auping will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York before travelling to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. His ground-breaking early works were included in seminal exhibitions such as ‘Three Young Americans’ at the Allen Memorial Museum and Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, both in 1959. His first solo exhibition was at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York in 1960. In 1970, at the age of 34, he was the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective at MoMA, and remains the only living American artist to be honoured with two retrospectives there, his second being in 1987. His work is represented in major museums and private collections around the world. Frank Stella was a recipient of National Medal of Arts in 2009. He lives in New York.
