Beschreibung:

Frank Stella Khurasan Gate III 1968 Acrylic and pencil on shaped canvas. 60 x 180 in. (152.4 x 457.2 cm). Signed “Stella” on the stretcher.
Provenance John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Collection of Richard A. Cramer Catalogue Essay Frank Stella’s Khurasan Gate III from 1968 is a prime example of his Protractor series which he begun in the late 60s. With this series Stella departed dramatically from the black paintings which he gained much acclaim and notoriety for in the early 60s, and his new series of works on unconventionally shaped canvases composed of vibrant color palettes heralded a new era for minimalism. Stella was greatly influenced by his contemporary Jasper Johns who in his art saw the object itself as being the image. Stella wanted to take this idea farther, and in his art eliminated not only the entire idea of subject matter, but also the evidence of the painter’s touch by leaving no trace whatsoever of individual style. By presenting shapes and patterns which easily and readily adapt to one another, Stella eliminated the concepts of foreground and background emphasizing the work’s presence as an object. As he said himself, “[...] only what can be seen there is there,” (Stella in B. Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” in 1966, Artnews, 1966). With the Protractor series, Stella has fully achieved his goal. Whereas as in the early 1960s he was working with a limited color palette producing his Black paintings, he later began use a far wider range of colors, which he typically applied in straight or curved lines. In this series, he constructed his paintings using varying semicircular units. The sections or segments of color that he fills the canvas with seem to radiate out as it they were drawn according to precise angles of calibration on a protractor. The resulting shapes that Stella created were the result of his attempt to achieve a strong sense of unity between the image he wanted to paint and the shape of the ground he used. This method or process acted as a total denial or refusal to accept the more conventional and established practice of starting with a predetermined rectangular ground and constructing the composition within it. The paintings Stella produced in this series acutely express his belief that a painting is a tangible object in and by itself and not merely some sort of screen to reflect. The titles for paintings from this series evolved from Stella’s fascination with historic cities he visited in Asia Minor in the early 1960s including Khurasan, Basra, Damascus and Harran. Each painting is titled after the city followed by a roman numeral which indicates to which of the groups—“interlaces,” “rainbows,” or “fans”—the work belongs. Khurasan Gate III, is an example from the group of fans. Read More Artist Bio Frank Stella American • 1936 - N/A One of the most important living artists, Frank Stella is recognized as the most significant painter that transitioned from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. He believes that the painting should be the central object of interest rather than represenative of some subject outside of the work. Stella experimented with relief and created sculptural pieces with prominent properties of collage included. Rejecting the normalities of Minimalism, the artist transformed his style in a way that inspired those who had lost hope for the practice. Stella lives in Malden, Massachusetts and is based in New York and Rock Tavern, New York. View More Works