Renowned American abstract artist Frank Stella is the man of the moment thanks to the Whitney Museum of American Art which will inaugurate its new Gansevoort Street home with the most comprehensive retrospective in the US to date of Stella’s work, opening on October 30, 2015 and continuing until February 7, 2016.Coinciding with the Whitney retrospective, London’s Bernard Jacobson Gallery is presenting an exhibition of Stella’s paintings and sculpture featuring works from several important series from the 1990s and 2000s, which the Gallery says demonstrate the unique sense of space, scale, and composition for which Stella is best known.The exhibition includes a “Michael Kohlhaas” (2000) panel from a series of paintings named after a novel by Heinrich von Kleistas as well as a group of the artist’s wall-mounted sculptures such as “Tell Shimshara” (2002) and “Giyan V (e)” (2002) which are constructed using techniques and materials that evoke the general archaeological process rather than represent specific sites.The centerpiece of the exhibition is Stella’s monumental seven panel 15-metre painting “Die Marquise von O…” (1999) which is also named after a Heinrich von Kleistas novel. According to Bernard Jacobson, Stella translates what he had previously achieved in three dimensions onto the two dimensional surface, composing a work of seemingly endless movement comprising a symphony of swirling shapes.Frank Stella stated, “When it’s successful the result creates a visual experience, but it does something more. It makes available to you both a kind of experience and information that you couldn’t have gotten any other way.”
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