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拍品專文
Derived from Frank Stella's significant Benjamin Moore paintings, Untitled, with its elegant horizontal bands of charcoal gray, exemplifies Stella's signature contribution as a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction, first realized in his Black paintings from 1959. Creating an electrifying contrast, the stripes of unpainted canvas poised against painted bands, Untitled typifies the tight geometry which resulted from Stella's precise and deliberate method of composition and preparation. "After all," Stella explained, "the aim of art is to create space-space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live" (F. Stella quoted in, S. Everett, Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modern Thought, New York, 1995, p. 246).
Directly acquired by the artist, Untitled has been part of the same private collection since its creation, with other versions of the Untitled paintings previously housed in the notable collections of Henry Geldzahler, Betty Parsons and the Museum Bochum. Though distinguished from the series by its scale, color and medium, Untitled features the same design as Palmito Ranch, the yellow canvas from the original Benjamin Moore series. Rejecting the notion of gestural abstraction heralded by the Abstract Expressionists, as well as the art world at large, Stella gravitated towards a painterly manifestation of minimalism. And yet, by also nominating a household brand as his medium, as in the Benjamin Moore series, he also dabbled into the domain of pop and the ever growing fascination with consumer culture during the 1960s.
Stella's paintings held a significant conceptual turn, distancing the final objects from notions of "handmade" artistic expression. He famously declared that painting was "a flat surface with paint on it-nothing more." (D. Bourdon, "A New Cut in Art: Oddly shaped canvases by Frank Stella challenge viewers" in Life, 19 January 1968, n.p.) His contributions to a changing notion of art were recognized early on at young age of twenty-four when, a year before his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, the artist was selected for inclusion in the 1959 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Sixteen Americans.
Directly acquired by the artist, Untitled has been part of the same private collection since its creation, with other versions of the Untitled paintings previously housed in the notable collections of Henry Geldzahler, Betty Parsons and the Museum Bochum. Though distinguished from the series by its scale, color and medium, Untitled features the same design as Palmito Ranch, the yellow canvas from the original Benjamin Moore series. Rejecting the notion of gestural abstraction heralded by the Abstract Expressionists, as well as the art world at large, Stella gravitated towards a painterly manifestation of minimalism. And yet, by also nominating a household brand as his medium, as in the Benjamin Moore series, he also dabbled into the domain of pop and the ever growing fascination with consumer culture during the 1960s.
Stella's paintings held a significant conceptual turn, distancing the final objects from notions of "handmade" artistic expression. He famously declared that painting was "a flat surface with paint on it-nothing more." (D. Bourdon, "A New Cut in Art: Oddly shaped canvases by Frank Stella challenge viewers" in Life, 19 January 1968, n.p.) His contributions to a changing notion of art were recognized early on at young age of twenty-four when, a year before his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, the artist was selected for inclusion in the 1959 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Sixteen Americans.