When he began discussing joining Boesky’s gallery last year, “I said, ‘It’s such a huge undertaking,’ ” Boesky recalls. “The same forms are there, but now they’re on steroids.” Lévy’s two-venue group show, which inaugurates her London space, features early work like Stella’s 5 Eldridge Street (Blue Horizon), a 1958 canvas named for conceptualist godfather Sol LeWitt’s old address.įor much of his career, Stella was represented by the late Leo Castelli and the now-defunct Knoedler Gallery. “They’re maximal sculpture but reductive at the same time,” Boesky says. Puffed Star II (2014), one of a group of five variations, is bright and shiny and seems to teeter on the edge of minimalism while also evoking the slick, reflective surfaces of artists such as (After insisting for decades that his three-dimensional works were just another form of painting, Stella is finally relenting and using the S-word to describe his latest series.) With a process called rapid prototyping, he imagines a piece on the computer, digitally inserting and deleting elements before sending the specs to a fabricator, which manufactures the finished product, often in aluminum or titanium. Boesky is presenting Fishkill, alongside newly fabricated works. New and old Stella is on view in concurrent shows now open at Dominique Lévy in London and New York and at What hasn’t slowed down is his drive to make art. Though a sometime passenger says Stella still drives with a lead foot-he was once arrested for doing 105 mph on the Taconic State Parkway and sentenced to deliver art lectures-Stella claims his stomach can’t take it, and he’s traded in his Ferrari for a Volkswagen. Pointing to a picture of Fishkill, a hulking steel 1995 piece assembled from castings around his studio, he notes, “Physically, I’m not really capable of doing this anymore.” Even with the cranes he has in his studio in upstate Newburgh, where he spends a few days a week, “it’s hands-on.” Age has also cramped his notorious love of speed. Nor does he make his giant sculptures by casting molten metal-the strain is too much. You have to be able to think, and I can’t concentrate for more than two or three hours.” You have to have balance and control, and you have to be able to move fast-I don’t have that anymore. “Some people are good at painting with their hands, but I need my whole body. “It’s hard to paint,” he says on a sunny September morning in Chelsea, not far from the Greenwich Village townhouse where he’s lived since 1967. Now he looks to less athletic techniques such as computer-aided design. His days of painting immense canvases, which stretched up to 50 feet long and 10 feet tall, are behind him.
After two back operations, two knee replacements and a new hip-“That’s probably why I like titanium,” he quips-his body has lost some of its strength over the past decade, changing the direction of his practice the way his nimble mind once did. Today, at 78, a white-haired, unshaven, yet spry-looking Stella is blunt about the other requirement for his art making: physicality.
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