Exclusive West Coast Presentation
Through February 26, 2017, at the de Young
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are pleased to present Frank Stella: A Retrospective, an expansive presentation surveying the career of this towering figure in post-WWII American art. Fifty works, including paintings, reliefs, sculptures and maquettes, are displayed at the de Young, representing Frank Stella’s prolific output from the late 1950s to the present day. This is the first comprehensive U.S. presentation devoted to the artist since 1970.
“Frank Stella’s impact on abstract art is unmatched,” says Max Hollein, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “This retrospective is timely and important for San Francisco audiences. To see the development of an artist who created ‘masterpieces’ just one year out of college, who is still working as a major force today—it is impressive to see an extraordinary body of work that spans six decades.”
Stella first burst into the New York art world in 1959, at the age of 23, when four of his Black Series (1958–1960) paintings were included in the group exhibition, Sixteen Americans, at the Museum of Modern Art. In the following six decades he has remained one of the most important and influential figures in the evolution of modern art. Stella anticipated and pioneered many of the explosive changes in the art world, and remains an enduring figure of both critical and popular attention, as well as controversy.
“Frank Stella’s works span the spectrum of art from Minimalist to Maximalist,” notes Timothy Anglin Burgard, Curator-in-Charge of American Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “In both ambition and achievement, his work appears to be the output of a dozen different artists. By combining intellectual rigor with aesthetic audacity these works have transformed the history of art.”
As part of the exhibition, Das Erdbeben in Chili [N#3] (The Earthquake in Chile) (1999)—one of Stella’s largest works, measuring 12 x 40.5 ft.—has been installed in Wilsey Court.
Frank Stella: A Retrospective comes to the de Young after a premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York and a showing at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
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