Frank Stella: A Retrospective at the de Young Museum
November 5, 2016– February 26, 2017

Frank Stella, Lac Laronge III, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 162 in. (274.3 × 411.5 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1970, K1970:8. © 2016 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York — Frank Stella, *Lac Laronge III*, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 162 in. (274.3 × 411.5 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1970, K1970:8. © 2016 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frank Stella: A Retrospective

November 5, 2016 – February 26, 2017

HERBST EXHIBITION GALLERIES

Frank Stella: A Retrospective is the first comprehensive US exhibition of the artist’s work since 1970. In 1959, at the age of 23, Stella (b. 1936) burst onto the New York art scene as an already mature artist with his now-legendary series of black paintings, which served as a pictorial manifesto of the artist’s assertion that a painting was “a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more.”

Though his early abstract works were influenced by, and thus seemed to share kinship with, the emerging Minimalist art movement, in the ensuing decades Stella’s compositions became increasingly complex and dynamic. These works expanded painting beyond its traditional definition by conflating it with sculpture, a medium in which he became increasingly interested.

Curated by Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the exhibition is co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. At the de Young, the installation will feature approximately 50 large-scale works, including paintings, wall-mounted reliefs, and three-dimensional sculptures. The exhibition design will highlight the transitions that connect aspects of this diverse body of work, acknowledging the artist’s different phases but positing them as pieces of a coherent whole.