Standing in front of Frank Stella's wall installation "Measurement of the Whale Skeleton" from 1988, which is several meters high and protrudes into the room, is an overwhelming event.

Forms and colors pile up in front of the viewer, which could represent waves, whirlpools, masses of water and seem to wash fins, pieces of skeletons and any other bulky parts of unknown objects to the surface of the water.

Are you on board a ship?

Do you dive in the sea?

Or have you fallen overboard after a storm and are now struggling between pieces of wreckage floating in the waves to avoid being torn down into the depths?

Catherine Deschka

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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These are questions that, of course, are not answered, but which come to mind when considering the dynamically exuberant, abstract work.

In any case, Stella herself wanted to convey the feeling of being on the high seas.

With the "Moby Dick Series" he pursues the vibrant tension of language and text.

"I'm looking for an answer to the question of whether abstraction is more suitable for giving the novel a visual expression than any illustration, no matter how skilful," he is quoted as saying in the show.

Stella's work from the “Moby Dick Series”, which comprises 135 sculptural works and with which he refers to the novel by Herman Melville, can now be seen in a large special exhibition at the Wiesbaden Museum.

The museum is celebrating Frank Stella, this year's winner of the Alexej von Jawlensky Prize, which is awarded every five years by the city of Wiesbaden, the Nassauische Sparkasse and the casino for an artist's lifetime achievement.

The curators of the exhibition, Jörg Daur and Valerie Ucke, have selected a total of 25 works by the artist, who was born in Massachusetts in 1936, that were created between 1958 and 2021 and thus represent more than six decades of his work.

The four chapters of the show, from the stripe paintings to Stella's departure into space and the ornamental in his works to his most recent works, the series "Salmon Rivers of the Maritime Provinces", are also tailored to the Wiesbaden museum's collection.

References to works of the house are made in apps.

With its focus on American art, the museum offers a context for Stella's early works, says director Andreas Henning.

There are also references to Art Nouveau and Baroque.

Because Stella has always dealt with essential questions of painting: what and how a picture can be, abstraction or representation, image, sign and ornament, these considerations occupied him in the examination of historical models as well as the questions of surface and space - with He was very busy with Caravaggio, for example.

The model for his "Pre-Black-Paintings", the paintings "Seward Park" and "West Broadway" (both 1958) is probably Jasper Johns' American flag.

In any case, the two paintings at the entrance to the show could show abstract flags.

But history is already being made in the next room.

There you can see the 1959 painting "Tomlinson Court Park I" from the series of the famous "Black Paintings".

The series that made Stella a star at the end of the 1950s at the age of just 22 when they were shown in the “Sixteen Americans” show at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

The black striped paintings only showed what they showed, as Stella once put it, and fundamentally changed painting.

They were reduced to form, stripes neatly applied with a brush and arranged in rectangles,

which Stella, like all her works, varied in series.

The "Aluminum Paintings" and the "Morrocan Paintings" were added later, and the paintings gained in color.

The artist steadily expanded the painting into space, first as an illusion, then in the reliefs of the "Polish Village Series" also in the pictorial structures, because now he used felt, paper, plywood and corrugated cardboard in addition to the canvas.

The current works, those of the past year dedicated to the Salmon Rivers in Canada and radiant in bright colors, have now fully emerged as a sculpture.

The objects created with the help of the 3D printer wind and meander on steel rods, twisting and turning into imaginative, bizarre shapes that the viewer no longer wants to detach from.

Frank Stella: Museum Wiesbaden, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2, until October 9, Tuesdays and Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Wednesdays and Fridays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m