Purple Magazine

2022-06-26

Frank Stella: Sculpture foregrounds three decades of the artist’s experimentation and expansion of the medium. Conceived in collaboration with the artist, this two-part exhibition features five monumental outdoor sculptures alongside a selection of small-scale works and reliefs across recurring motifs and materials. The earliest works in the show mark his emerging endeavors with computer-modeling and casting at the onset of the 1990s. At 86, Stella continues to break with artistic convention in his most recent body of work, completed in 2022. Typically viewed as transgressive, Stella sculpture signals an end to modernism’s “promise of purity.” These sculptures upend standard geometries through playful shapes and surfaces, seductive materials and finishes. His forms and dynamic movement, already found in his early paintings, take a tiger’s leap into the real.