Frank Stella
b. 1936, United States
The Chart (D-14, 1X), 1990
Mixed medium on aluminium and magnesium
168.9 x 146.1 x 63.5 cm
The Chart (D-14, 1X) is a part of Frank Stella’s Moby Dick series, lasting from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. As aluminium sheets are entangled with their vibrant designs applied through painting, spraying, and scribbling, the resulting sculpture is simultaneously abstract and defined in form, a culmination of Stella’s decades worth of lessons in painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Stella’s series-defining wave-whale shape can be seen in his interpolation of the metal sheets as they are layered over one another, capturing how the white whale looms in Captain Ahab’s increasingly frantic psyche as he obsesses over catching the whale in the forty-fourth chapter of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, which this work is named after. Stella’s incorporation of such narrative fragments thus directly references Wassily Kandinsky’s system of composition, allowing the artist to create “a particular impression which is our time’s version of Melville”.
Photo: Chris Felver
Frank Stella (1936-2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker highly acclaimed for his contributions to abstract expressionism and minimalism. While Stella’s early practice was defined by a reductionist approach following the sentiments of post-painterly abstraction, the artist would later delve into a wider range of media, materials, and dimensions that broadened his practice to involve multiple artwork series that would define his illustrious career. A recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2009, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011, Stella’s works are considered pivotal in the canon of 1960s American art. Multiple retrospectives on his career have been done by institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1970), and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2012).
