Pastel Stack

Referring to his severe and depersonalized view of art, painter, sculptor, and printmaker Frank Stella once stated, A painting is a flat surface with paint on it, nothing more. Beginning in the 1960s, he embraced the stark geometric abstraction of Minimalism as his primary mode of expression. In paintings, drawings, and prints alike, Stella used form, color, line, and pattern as his fundamental visual vocabulary. In Pastel Stack, the artist's first screenprint, Stella depicts a stack of rectangles, each penetrated with simple geometric forms, abstract arrangements appropriated from his Polygon series of paintings of 1965-67. Printed in tinted and transparent colors, these forms appear to float over an underlying grid pattern.