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Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series

 

Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series
(June 11–September 4, 2011)

Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series presents eight recent works by the renowned American abstract artist Frank Stella from his Scarlatti Kirkpatrick series (2006–), exhibited for the first time in a museum. The spiraling, polychrome works form a bold new chapter in Stella's decades-long career of artistic and technical innovation and reinvention, and are unlike any work he has done before.

The series title refers both to the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), known for his many harpsichord sonatas, and to the Yale musicologist and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–84), who popularized Scarlatti's work and produced the definitive catalogue of the sonatas in 1953. Stella's constructions, like the sonatas, are each assigned "K" numbers (for example, K.51), but their relationship to Scarlatti's music is one of visual rhythm and abstraction, rather than a literal correspondence. "If you were to be able to follow an edge" of a given work visually, says Stella, "and follow it through quickly, you'd get that sense of rhythm and movement that you get in music."

Works in the exhibition, which range from a multicolored, 15-foot construction to an intimate, two-foot monochromatic piece, suggest the scope of the ongoing series, which currently includes 150 pieces. For Stella, each begins as a form he makes by hand, which is scanned into a computer. Using a computer model based on the scans, he refines the structure before constructing a small-scale model. (Four are included in the exhibition.) He then creates the final, full-size work by mounting painted resin forms on spiraling lines of coiled steel. The effect is one of lightweight exuberance—very unlike Stella's previous, gravity-bound works, but evocative of the bright, energetic rhythm of a Scarlatti sonata.

By design, this exhibition is presented simultaneously with an exhibition of work by another pioneer of modern art, Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border. Visitors thus have the opportunity to see the work of two very different abstract artists, separated by a century, in visual conversation. Stella, in fact, has often written and lectured on Kandinsky, whom he admires for his work and for his groundbreaking defense of abstract modern art.

Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series is organized by The Phillips Collection.

Frank Stella, K.51, 2008. Courtesy of FreedmanArt. © 2011 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © 2011 Bruce White.