At the age of eighty-seven, American painter Frank Stella recently opened a new solo exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. Those who have always called him an academic painter may have to think again. Indeed, the artist-a minimalist by definition-has created five large sculptures made through new technologies, evidence of his evergreen contemporaneity. «I wanted to build a painting rather than paint it,» said Stella, who used two wide-bed trucks to transport the giant works from his studio in the Hudson Valley to Manhattan. Recent Sculpture is the title of the exhibition, which well emphasizes the recent creation of the works belonging to the two series Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick of 2014 and Atlantic Salmon Rivers of 2021-23. The five sculptures look like something out of midjourney or at least some digital animation. Indeed, the first step in their design is precisely the digital creation of computer models that then become small 3D printed maquettes. Then the artist refines them and sends them to builders in the Netherlands and Belgium where they are designed and built using technology derived from shipbuilding. The final step is for Frank Stella to finish them and paint them with automotive paint.

Those on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery are undoubtedly among the most ambitious and radical works by Frank Stella and, more generally, in the entire contemporary art scene in terms of technique and production process. Painting and sculpture come together in a new language that is extremely contemporary, while still remaining true to Stella’s poetics of shaping forms by drawing inspiration from the source materials. Here the forms, previously only two-dimensional in the artist’s production, leave the surface to float in anti-gravity, conquering even the new small screen, that of social media.

Ph Installation View Genevieve Hanson
Courtesy Frank Stella & Jeffrey Deitch Gallery