Frank Stella

Prince Frederick Arthur of Homburg, General of Cavalry, 1999

Frank Stella is one of the main exponents of the ‘shaped canvas’ in 1960s American Color Field painting. He examined the relationship between picture surface, color and form and expanded these ideas into three dimensions. Three-dimensional shapes break open the two-dimensional image and blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. And in this context the sculpturally wide-ranging work complex based on Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘Prinz Friedrich Arthur von Homburg’ is to be understood. The turbulent parts detaching themselves from each pictorial surface in the form of painted aluminum surfaces, are kept in balance in the air by a structure made of supports and steel cables. The connection with Kleist’s ‘Prinz von Homburg’ is by no means illustrative. Stella opens up an associative plane on which it would be possible to relate the movement to the protagonist or to the structure of the drama. It is rather the intention to portray the intrinsic qualities of the emergence of the image itself and show it as a work with its own inherent laws. The elements of the image conquer their own autonomous space, without becoming an illustration.