Frank Stella - Concentric Squares (1) - Offset Litho - AR Glass

Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.

Frank Stella initiated his Concentric Square and Mitered Maze paintings in 1962. Following his groundbreaking Black Paintings of the late 1950s inspired by the radical flatness he first encountered in Jasper Johns’s work, the Concentric Squares paintings create a visual illusion which foreshadowed Stella’s early experiments in three-dimensionality. The stripes in each painting are drawn in pencil, revealing the slight but discernable movement of the artist’s hand in their edges. Stella would execute preparatory sketches in pencil, paint, and gouache beforehand, demonstrating the meticulous nature with which the paintings were composed: each work was designed on graph paper, and the color scheme was strictly determined in advance. The Concentric Squares confront viewers with a strong optical effect: as one moves further from each painting, the colors appear to bleed together, and the composition leads the eye simultaneously inwards and outwards.

In the mid-1970s, Stella returned to the Concentric Squares, creating them in significantly larger formats with the addition of new colors. By this time, the artist had expanded his practice to include relief works such as the Polish Villages, and the renowned curator William Rubin described his return to flat canvases “as a kind of standard or a qualitative ‘scale’, by which to measure the necessity of using more complicated shapes, configurations or color arrangements.” In this new iteration of the series, the unpainted strips of the canvas between the bands are thinner, and Stella widened the bold interplay of colors. The present work (1977) displays a rich palette, interspersing a spectrum of primary and secondary colors with shades of red which deepen as the squares become larger. Both dynamic and rigorous in its composition, this expansive canvas is an outstanding example of Stella’s Concentric Squares of the 1970s and embodies his rigorous and life-long investigation into chromatic and spatial perception.

This piece is freshly framed and backed. Ready to hang.

Exterior Dimensions: 13"×13"

13" x 13"

18%

Jacob Herman | (203) 703-8762 | jeanjacobsgallery@gmail.com

Pickup Details

Jean Jacobs Gallery

84 Main Street, New Canaan CT 06840

When to Pickup

Saturday, 5/1, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm

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