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Frank StellaWW-1968-102148

1968·Color lithograph on paper·Sheet: 41 × 56 cm (16 3/16 × 22 1/16 in.)

Stella made his first prints in 1967, at the Gemini Graphic Editions Limited workshop founded by Ken Tyler in Los Angeles in 1965. Tyler, the workshop director at Tamarind in 1964-65, has been a constant collaborator with Stella, whose comments about Tyler in 1981 succinctly describe a typical relationship between artists and printers: He taught me everything I know about printmaking. He probably still does. He knows so much. He tells me how it's done. I say 'Can we do it this way?' And he sees if it can be done, or approximates it, or has a better idea. We keep working away at it. I don't know enough to get it myself. Stella's V Series comprises eight lithographs based on the stripe paintings of the Notched-V Series (1964-65). The brilliant metallic colors and slick surface Stella employed here exemplify the technical excellence for which Tyler has always been known.

Catalogue

Year: 1968
Medium: Color lithograph on paper
Dimensions: Sheet: 41 × 56 cm (16 3/16 × 22 1/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Frank Stella

Artist

Frank Stella

Painting

One of the most well-regarded postwar American artists still working today, Frank Stella (b. 1936) moved to New York in 1958 after graduating from Princeton, where he majored in history and studied painting. With his first series, “Black Paintings” (1958–60) – in which parallel patterns in black house paint were separated by pinstripes of unpainted canvas – the artist radically departed from his Abstract Expressionist forebears, declared himself a practitioner of nonrepresentational painting (work that is detached from any emotional, intellectual or physical reality) and helped launch Minimalism.

Malden, MA, USA

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