Lot Essay
Abajo is one of seven paintings which comprise the Running V series, created by Stella in 1964 and 1965. This series continued Stella's exploration of the shaped canvas, which he had begun in 1960 with his Aluminum series.
Stella had exploded onto the contemporary painting scene with his Black paintings of 1958-1960, started when he was only twenty-two years old. By the time he painted Abajo in 1964, he had established himself as an innovative and productive artist. He had already had seven one-man exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris, and his paintings and ideas had a profound effect on his contemporaries, artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Kenneth Noland. He led that group of second generation New York artists who rejected the highly charged, emotional self-expression of the Abstract Expressionists and focused instead on the rigorous simplicity of color, form and content. He seemed to have almost single-handedly altered the conventions of Modernist painting.
In the 1960s formalist criticism tended to concentrate on Stella's remarkable innovation of "the shaped canvas," presumably the inevitable, internal deductions from the primary premise of the black paintings. The logical, forward thrust here was breathtaking, the development from the Aluminum paintings of 1960, in which the enclosed, right-angle patterns seemed to impose the notched shapes of the canvas (and vice-versa), to the Running V paintings of 1965, in which the velocity of swerving, parallel stripes seemed to force the angled twists and turns of the canvas edge. (R. Rosenblum, quoted in L. Rubin, op.cit., p. 17)
Abajo is executed with metallic paints, a medium that attracted Stella because of its abstract, spatially ambiguous qualities. The sheen of the paint surface changes as the direction of the bands, which heightens the sensation of swift movement. The viewer tends to scan the piece from left to right, and the twenty-seven bands seem to accelerate as they swoop down in the zag and return back up to the right edge of the painting.
Five paintings in this highly prized series are in public collections: The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles.
Stella had exploded onto the contemporary painting scene with his Black paintings of 1958-1960, started when he was only twenty-two years old. By the time he painted Abajo in 1964, he had established himself as an innovative and productive artist. He had already had seven one-man exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris, and his paintings and ideas had a profound effect on his contemporaries, artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Kenneth Noland. He led that group of second generation New York artists who rejected the highly charged, emotional self-expression of the Abstract Expressionists and focused instead on the rigorous simplicity of color, form and content. He seemed to have almost single-handedly altered the conventions of Modernist painting.
In the 1960s formalist criticism tended to concentrate on Stella's remarkable innovation of "the shaped canvas," presumably the inevitable, internal deductions from the primary premise of the black paintings. The logical, forward thrust here was breathtaking, the development from the Aluminum paintings of 1960, in which the enclosed, right-angle patterns seemed to impose the notched shapes of the canvas (and vice-versa), to the Running V paintings of 1965, in which the velocity of swerving, parallel stripes seemed to force the angled twists and turns of the canvas edge. (R. Rosenblum, quoted in L. Rubin, op.cit., p. 17)
Abajo is executed with metallic paints, a medium that attracted Stella because of its abstract, spatially ambiguous qualities. The sheen of the paint surface changes as the direction of the bands, which heightens the sensation of swift movement. The viewer tends to scan the piece from left to right, and the twenty-seven bands seem to accelerate as they swoop down in the zag and return back up to the right edge of the painting.
Five paintings in this highly prized series are in public collections: The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles.