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FRANK STELLA UNBOUND

LITERATURE AND PRINTMAKING

OCTOBER 6, 2018 - JANUARY 13, 2019

Cantahar from the series Imaginary Places III by Frank Stella

© FRANK STELLA, Cantahar from the series Imaginary Places III, 1998. Lithograph, screenprint, etching, aquatint, and relief on handmade paper, 52 ½ × 52 ½ inches. Published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Tyler Graphics Ltd. 1974-2001 Collection, given in honor of Frank Stella, 2003.44.27. © 2018 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Had Gadya: Front Cover by Frank Stella

© FRANK STELLA, Had Gadya: Front Cover, 1984. Hand-coloring and hand-cut collage with lithograph, linocut, and screenprint, 42 1/2 × 33 7/8 inches. Published by Waddington Graphics. Collection of Preston H. Haskell. © 2018 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Cabin. Ahab and Starbuck by Frank Stella

© FRANK STELLA, The Cabin. Ahab and Starbuck, 1991. Etching, aquatint, relief, and Carborundum on white, shaped TGL handmade paper, 73 x 53 x 6 inches. Collection of Preston H. Haskell. © 2018 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Monkey Rope by Frank Stella

© FRANK STELLA, The Monkey Rope, 1993. Lithograph, etching, aquatint, relief, engraving, and screenprint on white TGL handmade paper, 23 3/4 × 68 1/4 inches. Collection of Preston H. Haskell. © 2018 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Between 1984 and 1999, the American artist Frank Stella executed four ambitious print series, each of which was named after a literary work that had a distinctive narrative structure: the Passover song Had Gadya, a compilation of Italian Folktales, the epic novel Moby Dick, and the illustrated encyclopedia Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Through these four bodies of work, Stella evolved printmaking projects of unprecedented scale and complexity that both transformed the artist's visual language-as well as his working process in all media-and represent a technical and expressive milestone in printmaking. Featuring about forty prints from these four major series, Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the vital role that world literature played in his powerful exploration of the print medium.

FRANK STELLA UNBOUND: LITERATURE AND PRINTMAKING IS ORGANIZED BY THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM

ARTISTS

headshot of Frank Stella

FRANK STELLA

From free-standing sculptures to architectural sites, Frank Stella's unyielding experimentation has made him a key figure in American modernism, leading to such developments as Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Color Field Painting. An early practitioner of nonrepresentational painting, Stella gained early, immediate recognition in 1959 with his series of coolly impersonal black-striped paintings that turned the gestural brushwork and existential angst of Abstract Expressionism on its head.

Photo by Kristine Larsen