PRESS RELEASE
Springing from the enormously successful vernal exhibition America which celebrated its longstanding collaboration with American artists, the Keitelman Gallery has the honor of inaugurating a monographic presentation dedicated to Frank Stella, an artist whose grand collages had been on display in the gallery during the spring.
Stella's art is primarily marked by the extraordinary disinhibition of shapes. It could even be qualified as an extraordinary mastering of form, as his work gives free reign to an exquisite visual inventiveness that, in many ways, evokes the work of Pablo Picasso. Like Picasso, Stella possesses a rare prowess in composition and in the mastery of lines. The line, in this regard, acts as a guide, a galvanizer, and a signature. It twirls, swathes, and doubles back on itself only to be transformed into something even more beautiful. To follow its capricious course, reminiscent to that of a river, becomes a game for the spectator. Such whirling becomes vitality; the vitality that is present in all of his work.
As seen just as clearly in his sculptures as in his two-dimensional art, Stella has also presented a union of varying ways to create an image, in the ironic detachment characteristic of pop art. The swirl of abstract expressionism neighbors vast ranges of color or more frugal, Zen-like whites. The remainder consists of an array of techniques: screen printing, watercolor, acrylic, aquatint, alkyd... He is thus a true master of mixed media.
Born in 1939 in Malden, Massachusetts, following his art studies at Phillips Academy Andover, Stella studied art history at Princeton from 1954 to 1958. Upon completing his studies, he moved to New York and began his career, which was marked with brilliance from the very beginning. By 1959, his work was exhibited at Leo Castelli's prestigious gallery as well as at the MoMa, and Alfred Barr purchased a piece that same year. Married to the art historian Barbara Rose, he mingled with all of New York's avant-garde, made up of pop art, minimalism and abstract expressionism. He collaborated with some of his senior representatives and participated in a piece by Merce Cunningham alongside Robert Rauschenberg.
He partook in the Venice Biennale in 1964 and the Documenta IV in Kassel in 1968. His first major museum presentation was held in 1970 when he was only thirty-four years old, at the MoMA in New York. He later had the rare privilege of another exhibition at MoMA in 1987.
Frank Stella is one of the luminaries of American art. A retrospective has just been dedicated to him at the Whitney Museum in New York (30/10/2015-07/03/2016), which will continue throughout the upcoming months and will also be at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (17/04-04/09/2016) and at the Young Museum in San Francisco (05/11/2016-26/02/2017).
Stella's art is voluble, lively, cheerful, and distinguished by an eternal youthfulness. It is this work, a rare treat in Belgium, that Keitelman Gallery is pleased to present today.
Keitelman Gallery, 2016