Go See – New York: Frank Stella’s ‘Exotic Birds’ at L&M Arts through January 30th 2010
January 20th, 2010
Exhibition View, by Frank Stella, via L & M Gallery
Currently on view at L & M Gallery in New York is Frank Stella’s “Exotic Birds.” The exhibition features work the artist executed in 1975 in the form of twenty-eight graph paper drawings which he then converted into Foamcore maquettes. In 1976, he transformed the maquettes into a series of large-scale aluminum reliefs known as “Exotic Birds.” According to renowned curator William Rubin, the series signaled a transition in Stella’s work, “that was radical on the levels of both method and pictorial language.”
More text and related links after the jump….
Exhibition View by Frank Stella, via L & M Gallery
The artist used a multi-stage execution in order to realize the “Exotic Birds.” In Kagu, for example, the curving forms of the painting are not freehand drawings but actually “found objects” appropriated from the language of mechanical drawing used by architects and engineers. Stella arranged his two-dimensional compositions until he was satisfied with the image. He then elevates the work to three-dimensional form by angling the templates against the picture frame.
Exhibition View by Frank Stella, via L & M Gallery
The artist’s note which are found throughout the works act almost like an architectural floor plan- directing the viewer where to turn to next and emphasizing the very mechanical and calculated process that was used for such creation. In “Exotic Birds” Stella likewise incorporates color in order to bring his very architectural compositions to life. Color also signals the end of flatness in his work.
Artist and Model (2009) by Frank Stella, via L & M Gallery
Overall, Stella emphasized such curves as objects to be seen as part of “reality.” They break through pictorial boundaries and enter the viewer’s space. In the words of the artist, “The templates start with an image value and an aesthetic existence of their own, whether or not you recognize them – as I do – as tools, I wanted to transform that, to raise the level of it from design into art, and to make it physical; in effect, to give the templates a real presence, a pictorial presence… Abstraction has to be made ‘real’ in Picasso’s pictorial sense of the word… abstraction has, in some curious sense, not to be abstract.”
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [L&M Gallery]
Large-Scale Aluminum Reliefs by Frank Stella at L & M Gallery [Artdaily]
Frank Stella: Exotic Birds [Artnet]
-R.A.P.
