Autumn is a very busy and exciting time in the London art world. With collectors back from holiday and following a rather long break in the sale season, the London art scene is gearing up for one of the most important dates in the calendar: The Frieze Art Fair.
To coincide with Frieze, and to take advantage of the influx of collectors from around the world, museums, auction houses and galleries are gathering their best material to participate in this increasingly important celebration of art that will soon be taking over the British capital.
This year, Haunch of Venison will be showing the work of one of the most important and influential American artists of the last fifty years: Frank Stella.
In Frank Stella: Connections, Haunch of Venison brings together a wide range of Stella’s two- and-three-dimensional works, spanning an extraordinarily diverse career of more than fifty years. His exploration of surfaces and spaces, relief, colour and movement, a constant preoccupation in the artist’s œuvre, will be on display at the Mayfair gallery, and will include previously unseen early minimalist works, paintings from the 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as examples of his monumental metal sculptures.
Born in Massachusetts in 1936, Frank Stella studied history and painting at Princeton University. He was influenced by Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, and although initially a follower of Abstract Expressionism, he made his mark in the art world by creating works that seemed to oppose this movement. Some of the first pictures he exhibited in New York around 1958 consisted of black canvases with flat regular bands. In 1960 he had his first solo show with Leo Castelli Gallery. As his painting and printmaking developed, Stella experimented with colour and relief, leading him eventually to sculpture as well. He was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome (1982-83), named Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1983-84) and in 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.
This exhibition is organised by Haunch of Venison in collaboration with FreedmanArt, New York. The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg will be hosting a Stella retrospective in 2012, and a major retrospective, curated by Michael Auping, is scheduled to take place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2014-15, before it travels to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Work and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA).
This show will be on from 30th September to 26th November at the gallery’s space at the Royal Academy of Arts. It is the first important solo show of Stella’s work in London after the ICA show nearly 25 years ago, and it is bound to attract a lot of attention.
Frank Stella: Connections
30 September – 26 November 2011
Haunch of Venison
6 Burlington Gardens
London,W1S 3ET
United Kingdom
