NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is pleased to present Frank Stella: Experiment and Change, an exhibition that spans the artist’s 60-year career from the late 1950’s to the present. The exhibition, composed of approximately 300 paintings, relief sculpture and drawings will offer insight into his trajectory from minimalism (e.g. the geometry of the black paintings) to maximalism (eg. the spatially complex constructionist and large sculptures of the Moby Dick series.) Curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator, Experiment and Change leads the museum’s 60th anniversary celebration presented by AutoNation, and will be on view from November 12, 2017 to July 8, 2018.
The exhibition juxtaposes works from various periods of Stella’s career, revealing his aesthetic development and focusing on his “Working Archive,” which contains material never exhibited before, such as notes, sketches and maquettes that shed light on his growth as an artist. Stella’s diverse interests include art history, architecture, new materials (fluorescent pigment, carbon fiber, titanium, et al.) and computer-aided modeling for rapid prototyping. His preparatory studies show the ideas in his work that led to a notion about the enlargement of pictorial space.
Included will be penciled color sequences for the larger concentric square paintings (1973), flat foam-core cut-outs leading to the emergence of a more generous “working space” and 3D printed models from the 1990’s through the present outlining the use of digital technology.
Frank Stella (b. 1936) emerged as part of a generation of American artists excited by, driven and challenged by Abstract Expressionism. Frank Stella: Experiment and Change emphasizes the variety of expression found throughout his entire body of work. The twists and turns of Stella’s career are illuminated by insights that were discovered during the curatorial process. This exhibition elaborates on the research Clearwater began for a previous exhibition, Frank Stella at 2000: Changing the Rules, an in-depth exploration of the artist’s bold paintings, sculpture and architectural models from the 90’s.
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