Frank Stella, K.144, 2013

Narrator: Stella has long used digital imaging software. In many works, including the more recent ones in this room, he has also used a 3-D printer. Artist Jordan Kantor.

Jordan Kantor: What’s interesting here is we see the artist working with some compositional principles and dynamic spaces that we can recognize from works that he made as many as twenty-five years before, such as in the Circuit Series with this emphasis of moving your eye all the way around the composition.

He’s kind of, I believe wittingly, updating a dynamic language maybe associated with earlier painting all the way back through Abstract Expressionism to maybe even something like Rubens in the way that he's moving our eye around through the space. But he's doing it through lines that have been mediated by some degree of digital technology.

We know that in order for these things to be fabricated this way, at some point they had to arrive into a computer, and they had to come out of a machine. That is a really interesting twist on this idea of gesture. Specifically, as it might relate to a moving arm in space that we could associate with a practice like Jackson Pollock's, for example. Which is something, at the early part of his career, he certainly was cognizant of and responding to.