MEATPACKING DISTRICT — The Whitney Museum's first career retrospective of a living artist in its new Gansevoort Street home will feature work from Frank Stella's nearly 60-year career.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The Whitney said it is the first Stella exhibition of this size to be put together in this country since the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective in 1987.
Fort Worth's chief curator Michael Auping said Stella's "need from the beginning of his career to immediately and continually make new work in response to previous series" was just one of the challenging aspects of putting together a retrospective of the prolific artist's work.
"He has never been timid about making large, even monumental, works," Auping said. "The result has been an enormous body of work represented by many different series. Our goal has been to summarize without losing the raw texture of his many innovations.”
The exhibition includes roughly 100 paintings, sculptures and prints, with some iconic contributions from major museums and private collectors. The curators said it sets his most recognizable works along with some rarely-seen pieces in an effort to show how his style has varied and changed over his expansive nearly six-decade career.
They also included some of Stella's sketches and mock-ups to show his artistic process, so that the exihibit is "not merely [about] the length of his career," Whitney director Adam Weinberg said.
The exihibit, designed by "starchitect" Annabelle Selldorf, will fill the 18,000-square-foot fifth floor gallery, the museum's largest space for temporary exhibitions.
It opens Oct. 30 and will run through Feb. 7 at the Whitney, before moving to Fort Worth from April 17 to Sept. 4. It will later be shown at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.
