CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4//2016

A Conversation with Frank Stella

Wednesday, April 20, Phillips auction house hosted influential American artist Frank Stella speaking about his career and history as a printmaker, alongside a signing of the new Catalogue Raisonné of his prints. Stellla was joined by Richard H. Axsom, author and senior curator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; and Jordan Schnitzer, collector and publisher of the book. In addition to the making of the book, the discussion, which can be viewed below, explores the artist's experiments in redefining the traditional print - from his early minimalist geometric abstractions to the baroque quality of later works.

"The paintings, reliefs, and prints have ... undergone technical and stylistic changes over time in often-abrupt moves, which in the early years made some of the audience grumpy over what was left behind. Weaving it all together, however, and forming the wholeness of his art, is Stella’s desire to create works of art of great immediacy, whose vibrant color, emphatic forms, and dynamic spatial qualities wrest the viewer’s eye and mind with the compelling beauty of paint, canvas, metal, ink, paper, image, and allusion. The means to achieve this in the prints are chronicled here in a series of breakthroughs. They and the issues raised punctuate the history of Stella’s prints, one inseparable from the paintings and reliefs. Stella’s work in all media is intricately interrelated in materiality, technique, style, and image. His art is a seamless whole."
- Richard H. Axsom, Frank Stella: Prints, A Catalogue Raisonné