Frank Stella Merce Cunningham & Dance Company Latin American Tour, 1968

Frank Stella

Merce Cunningham & Dance Company Latin American Tour, 1968

Lithograph on paper affixed to black paper board

© 1968 Frank Stella on the front

27 × 48 inches

Unframed

This uncommon vintage mid-1960s color lithographic shaped poster was published on the occasion of the Merce Cunningham & Dance Company Latin American Tour 1968.
Frank Stella was commissioned to design the set and costumes for a performance by Merce Cunningham in 1967, and he designed this poster for the company's Latin American tour for the following year. The design refers to the images from Stella's Protractor series dated 1967-70. The half circle form is divided visually by bands of bright color into quarter circles. Thick bands of color alternate as in his other works from the same time. Stella incorporates words from the advertisement seamlessly into his piece; the curved lines fill in outer band and repeat inwardly so that some symmetry is retained.

About Frank Stella:
Frank Stella (b. 1936; Malden, MA) has produced an extraordinary body of work over the past six decades. Since his first solo gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, Stella has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. Early in his career, his work was included in a number of significant exhibitions that defined the art in the postwar era, including Sixteen Americans (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959), Geometric Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1962) The Shaped Canvas (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964-65), Systemic Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966), Documenta 4 (1968), and Structure of Color (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971). Stella’s recent work uses digital modeling to explore how subtle changes in scale, texture, color and material can affect our perception and experience of an object.

Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery