Spectralia (Axsom and Kolb 226), 1994 by Frank Stella

Provenance:
Leo Castelli Graphics, New York
Private Collection
Collection of Art Windsor-Essex

Literature:
Richard H. Axsom with Leah Kolb, "Frank Stella Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné", 1st edition, New York, 2016, catalogue no. 226

Most of the titles for the prints that make up the "Imaginary Places Series" were lifted from "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places" by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. Written in the format of a nineteenth-century traveller’s guide, it offers a catalogue of fictional locations taken from the world of literature. However, Richard Axsom, the senior curator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, explains that the title for the work, "Spectralia", came directly from chapter thirty-four in Godfrey Sweven’s 1901 "Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles."

Axsom describes the visual aspect of the series: “The prints of the 'Imaginary Places' stand alongside the paintings and reliefs of the 'Imaginary Places Series' (1994-2004). Begun in the same year, they are recognizable for their teeming compositions of twisting, colliding, and knotted forms, held in check by their squared, elongated horizontal, circular and near-elliptical formats. Shapes often spill out of these formats, seeming to escape, even obliterate their containers”. Relief printing for the artist was extremely important, and according to Axsom, “Relief, which had always been a chief concern of Stella’s in his paintings and prints, was a means to extend pictorial space into our own—an insistence on our immediate visual and physical engagement with a work of art.”

By relying on various printmaking media in "Spectralia", including lithography, etching, relief printing, aquatint, engraving and screenprinting, Stella ultimately pushes the boundaries of traditional printmaking practices beyond the conventional and into bold abstraction.