Frank Stella – Desparia

Description

Frank Stella, Desparia from the series Imaginary Places is a large horizontal screenprint, lithograph, etching, relief, aquatint, collograph and engraving in colors.  This print is signed, dated, and numbered from the edition of 50 on the front.  Published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York.

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 screen printing. Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover (1950-1954), where he studied painting with Patrick Morgan. Stella graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of arts degree in history in 1958. Because Princeton did not offer a degree in studio art, his development during these years was largely the result of self-teaching. However, he received important advice and encouragement from the painter Stephen Greene and the art historian William Seitz, both then teaching at Princeton.

Stella’s first important group show was the Museum of Modern Art’s “Sixteen Americans,” held in 1959; this exhibition established him as one of the most radical young artists working in the United States. He instantly gained notoriety for his Black Paintings, a series of linear shapes and squares in various shades of black. A year later he had his first one-man show in New York City. Throughout the 1960s he exhibited regularly, and his work was included in numerous national and international group shows, the most important of which were the São Paulo Biennial and the Fogg Museum of Art’s “Three American Painters,” both held in 1965. His reputation and influence grew steadily, and in 1970 he was honored with a retrospective exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art.

Frank Stella, Desparia