Frank Stella – East Euralia

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. Motifs in the Imaginary Places prints are both appropriated from the artist’s vast repository of discarded proofs and plates. Stella drew upon, among other sources, fragmentary elements from the Circuits and Moby Dick prints, as well as portions of his cast and poured aluminum plates created when he was working on his sculpture at the Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry in upstate New York. Relief, which had always been a primary preoccupation of Stella’s in his paintings and prints, was a means to extend pictorial space into that of the viewer—a demand for his or her immediate visual and physical engagement with the work. It is once more at the fore in the Imaginary Places prints.