Frank Stella

Born Malden, MA, 1936.  Lives New York City

Chodorów II, 1971
Acrylic, canvas, felt, and enamel on shaped canvas
108 x 106 inches
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Mimi and Bud Floback

Credit line: © 2011 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo credit: Nancy Robinson Watson

By the 1960s, Frank Stella was acknowledged as a leading exponent of Minimalism, which emphasized the artwork as a physical object independent of any allusions to the outside world.  In the 1970s, Stella began producing series of works that became increasingly complex in terms of space and form, eventually developing into what he called "maximalist" paintings. 

Chodorów II, is part of a series known as the Polish Village paintings, created between 1970 and 1973 as part of his investigations of "Irregular Polygon and Protractor Canvases."  The Polish Village series is exemplary of Stella's "maximalist" paintings and was inspired by the geometric forms of early 20th-century Russian Constructivism and by the carpentry of Eastern European wooden synagogues. They are large-scale collage reliefs composed of several shaped canvases that are held together by the axis of an implied rectangle.  Each segment of the painting has a different color and texture, which Stella created using a variety of materials such as felt and paper pasted over stretched canvas.  Each of these canvases is shaped differently and then later positioned one over the other or even interlocking, giving the effect that the piece floats on the wall.