Frank Stella Recent Sculpture @ Jeffery Deitch SoHo
March 8 – May 18 2024
A delight for the senses. Massive, candy-colored sculptures that look like they were built in an airplane hangar. The press release informs us they are fabricated in the Netherlands and Belgium using “technology derived from shipbuilding” before they are shipped to New York, where they are finished and painted with automotive paint. The exhibition includes five monumental sculptures, three from 2014 in fiberglass on foam core, and two more recent sculptures from 2021 and 2022 in aluminum and fiberglass, respectively
These recent sculptures maintain the impersonal finish of Stella’s earliest black paintings, along with the nestled, shapes-within shapes quality that first emerged in his colorful shaped canvases of the late 60s, and remains a through line in Stella’s body of work as the shaped canvases became reliefs, and eventually full on sculptures.
Of course, like the exhibition of David Smith’s late sculptures that just closed at Hauser and Wirth, Stella’s works are deeply and mostly still concerned with the conventions of painting. They tell us this much in the press release, saying one of his recent objectives has been to “build a painting rather than painting a painting.” One of the most obvious ways Stella’s new sculpture ties itself to painting is through the fact that sculptures conventionally begin on the ground while paintings begin off the ground—they hang on the wall. At Deitch, the three 2014 works all stand on wheels, kind of like a massive steel office chair type of base. While they literally begin on the ground, the use of this base seems to suggest that the works relationship to the ground is ultimately unimportant.
The two newer sculptures, my favorites of the exhibition actually do not touch the ground. They each appear to hang on an bent aluminum bar that spans across two small columns, which gives the impression of suspension like it’s hung up on a clothesline, or trying to recreate, in three dimensions, the conditions of seeing a painting, which usually means a kind of floating. In both series, it seems like Stella is trying to decouple sculpture with groundedness.
The glossy, metallic, bright qualities of the automotive paint, which signal finish, decoration, and commodity are fun, but moreover distinguish and activate the surfaces of different parts of the sculpture as discrete elements. At the same time, they way the pieces overlap, snake in and out of each other, and alternatively enclose or are enclosed by other elements of the sculpture create an ambiguity that makes it difficult to parse both the entirety of any one specific element, or of the overall shape of a given sculpture.
This quality of spatial ambiguity, specifically as it relates to shape began to appear in Stella’s paintings by 1966, when Michael Fried reviewed his paintings of that year for the November issue of Artforum in an essay titled “Frank Stella’s New Paintings.” I find two of claims Fried’s claims about these 1966 paintings particularly salient when thinking about the big ass sculptures at Jeffery Deitch:
1) “…the paintings are infused with an extraordinary and compelling directionality, and that one is made to feel that the important difference in them is not between “inside” and “outside” but between open and closed” (Fried, p. 24).
2) "…nothing is more fundamental to the nature of the new paintings’s illusiveness than the extreme ambiguity, indeterminacy and multivalence of the relations that appear to obtain among the individual shapes, as well as between those shapes and the surface of the picture” (Fried, p. 24).
Basically, I want to highlight what I think is an important throughline from his earlier work to the sculptures—a polarity of openness/closedness instead of interiority/exteriority, accompanied by a fundamental ambiguity, which prevents individual shapes from standing in any stable relationship with one another.
Fried’s prime example of this openness/closedness polarity at work in the 1966 paintings was Union III. Here, Fried says, the sides of the canvas where painted bands run along are experienced by the viewer as “closed (or closed off),” where the side at the top of the painting, not enclosed by a border are felt by the viewer as open, allowing for a sort of sense of vertical expansion.
By “the multivalence of shapes,” he means that shape doesn’t have a single, definite spatial context in relation to each other shape. In the 1966 paintings, this could be seen, to keep with Union III in how the central grey square shape can be seen as just that square, but also as part of the grey line in the same shade extending to the left of the grey square, or also part of the blue line around the perimeter, or not a square at all and more like a almost square polygon with a pointy top right corner. Is this making sense? I feel like it’s so much harder to write out descriptive stuff like this, but simply put, each shape is legibly part of an array of other shapes in a way that makes it difficult to name with certainty any individual shape in the configuration.
Stella’s new sculptures, which are still mainly about shape (his work has always been mainly about shape), rather than having any discernable outline, consist of points of relative openness/closedness. They also maintain and push the same fundamental ambiguity of shape as his wall works to an unprecedented scope—in physical size, complexity of shape, combination of rounded and linear surfaces, and by the fact of being fully three dimensional. It is often difficult to tell which shape encloses which, and even more difficult to imagine how each work was put together, as in the order in which the parts were combined. Curved, fanned, pinwheeled, tubular, sometimes papery, sometimes curved, ear-canal-like connections.
The Grand Cascapedia, one of the aluminum sculptures from 2021, was in my opinion, the most successful sculpture in the show. It hangs off of the ground on a pole armature, which sags in the middle with smooth precision. The horizontal armature bar goes between two rectangular curved sheets of metal, curved kind of like paper with ovaloid holes in the middle that the horizontal armature snakes through. Various aluminum elements stack around the core of the work or loop through it in a way that hides the center, and the shapes are often welded literally into one another so that, for example on the left side, a yellow rectangular sheet slices into the corner of a white element, making the corner of the white sheet also legible as a distinct triangle.
Most of the shapes in The Grand Cascapedia have holes in them which give partial views of the other shapes composing the configuration, making the sense of openness/closedness literal, whereas in his paintings, it was just an effect. In the new sculptures, there is no real relation from part to whole, because neither are fully distinguishable as separate from each other. A painting in three dimensions after all.