SO I don’t mean from the studio point of view, but literally, in terms of what art historians and critics say about you.įS It’s not an issue anymore. Whether it’s about me or Picasso or Lascaux, it’s all the same to me. It’s the same history that it’s always been-the history of art. What’s it like painting against your own history?įrank Stella It’s not a big deal. Saul Ostrow A lot of young painters I know were blown away by your show two years ago of big, flat paintings. In the last two decades, his commitment to literal rather than pictorial space has lead Stella to an involvement with not only sculpture but architecture.
These virtual and schematic elements he pictorially combines into intense optical fields ordered by their materiality and their sensuousness, or he makes them into 3-D elements for his wall reliefs and sculptures. In recent years this has led him to use digital media’s ability to abstract, reproduce and concretize the ephemeral and the temporal, transforming smoke into phantasmagoric images and forms. What this has meant for Stella is that not only has he expanded upon his own historicized work of the late ’50s through the ’70s-work that turned abstract painting into ‘a thing in the world’ rather than pictures or signs of thoughts or emotions-but that he also opened for himself a new conceptual and visual space. What emerges is a portrait of an artist who, for 40 years, has aggressively worked to maintain and reinvigorate abstract painting. There in the ever dimming late-afternoon light, surrounded by his newest works-comparatively small to mid-sized painted wall reliefs and large-scale collages of computer generated images-we spoke of his views and attitude toward his work, both past and present. We sat-he in a chaise and me in an armchair-in the middle of his cavernous second floor. The Melancholy Pseudo-Symphony of 69 Love SongsĪt the end of his workday, I met with Frank Stella in his studio/factory. Sheila Kohler’s One Girl: A Novel in StoriesĮrika Suderburg’s Space, Site, Intervention