Calvinia

Description

Calvinia, 1995 by Frank Stella from the series Imaginary Places is a large horizontal screenprint, lithograph, etching, relief, aquatint, collograph and engraving in colors.  It is signed, dated, and numbered from the edition of 50 on the front in the middle.

Produced over a period of four years, the prints of Imaginary Places are named for The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. Written in the style of nineteenth-century traveler’s guides, the book is an archive of fictional locations culled from world literature.
The prints of Imaginary Places possess the same baroque exuberance of gesture that defines the paintings and reliefs of the Imaginary Places Series (1994-2004). Begun the same year, they are identifiable by their teeming compositions of twisting, colliding, and knotted forms, held in check by their squared formats. Shapes often spill out of these formats, seeming to evade, even obliterate, their containers. To realize these dynamic, extravagant compositions, Stella employed his full arsenal of printmaking media—including etching, engraving, aquatint, mezzotint, relief printing, lithography, and screenprinting.
The prints of Imaginary Places insist that the viewer think physically in surface and space, not merely reflexively about ideas. Color must be seen as a structural element in these prints, a material in and of itself. Their lively blend of artistic innovation and spatial investigation are characteristic of Stella’s artmaking and demonstrate how the artist’s highly experimental endeavors in printmaking have redefined the traditional print.