FRANK STELLA
THE RETROSPECTIVE. WORKS 1958-2012
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1 - 38440 Wolfsburg
8/9/2012 - 20/1/2013
Frank Stella (born 1936) is one of the last living heroes of American painting from the 1950s and 1960s. Stella’s recent works demonstrate yet again his compelling path in the direction of abstraction. Hardly twenty-years old, the young artist conquered the New York art scene in the late 1950s with a sensation: His large Black Paintings not only intensified the debate on Minimalism in painting but also prepared the way for the “exit from the picture into space.” But unlike his contemporaries, Stella took a completely independent path that led him to ever more opulent, ever more baroque reliefs. With his turn “from Minimalism to Maximalism,” Frank Stella developed into one of the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. Featuring circa 63 mostly large-format works as well as 82 drawings and sketches, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is honoring Frank Stella with a comprehensive exhibition that makes up the capstone to the wide range of presentations celebrating the artist’s 75th birthday.
With its great hall and flexible wall system, the Kunstmuseum enables the colorful, in part extremely large aluminum reliefs to fully unfold in a way that hardly any other museum can, namely thanks to a customized exhibition architecture. It supports the representation of his work’s logical development over a half century, tracing in the process the artist’s successive efforts to conquer space from the two-dimensionality of the painting up to and including his visionary and most recent works. The retrospective simultaneously wishes to place Stella’s oeuvre in a broader art historical context that extends far beyond modernism for the first time. ArchiSculptures and architectural models make up the conclusion of the exhibition.
THE RETROSPECTIVE. WORKS 1958-2012
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1 - 38440 Wolfsburg
8/9/2012 - 20/1/2013
Frank Stella (born 1936) is one of the last living heroes of American painting from the 1950s and 1960s. Stella’s recent works demonstrate yet again his compelling path in the direction of abstraction. Hardly twenty-years old, the young artist conquered the New York art scene in the late 1950s with a sensation: His large Black Paintings not only intensified the debate on Minimalism in painting but also prepared the way for the “exit from the picture into space.” But unlike his contemporaries, Stella took a completely independent path that led him to ever more opulent, ever more baroque reliefs. With his turn “from Minimalism to Maximalism,” Frank Stella developed into one of the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. Featuring circa 63 mostly large-format works as well as 82 drawings and sketches, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is honoring Frank Stella with a comprehensive exhibition that makes up the capstone to the wide range of presentations celebrating the artist’s 75th birthday.
With its great hall and flexible wall system, the Kunstmuseum enables the colorful, in part extremely large aluminum reliefs to fully unfold in a way that hardly any other museum can, namely thanks to a customized exhibition architecture. It supports the representation of his work’s logical development over a half century, tracing in the process the artist’s successive efforts to conquer space from the two-dimensionality of the painting up to and including his visionary and most recent works. The retrospective simultaneously wishes to place Stella’s oeuvre in a broader art historical context that extends far beyond modernism for the first time. ArchiSculptures and architectural models make up the conclusion of the exhibition.
