Description

Catalogue of the exhibition Frank Stella. Moby Dick Series , presented at Malba between September 9 and October 31, 2005.

In his teens, Stella first read Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1850/1851), and in 1956 he saw John Huston's film adaptation starring Gregory Peck. Fascinated by the New York writer's novel, Stella dedicated more than a decade to creating a series of works based on this literary classic: one or two pieces for each of the text's 135 chapters. The complete series comprises 266 pieces: metal reliefs, sculptures, paintings, prints, and murals.

Edward Shaw notes in one of his essays for the catalogue: “ Both Melville and Stella, both singular individuals, possessed the imagination and magnanimity necessary to embark on such a journey. Although Moby Dick is a fleeting, almost intangible presence in the book, and an indecipherable entity in Stella’s imagination, it enters the minds of the two creators like an overwhelming love that allows no respite or rest. (...) Melville’s obsession was with the creature itself and all it represented; Stella’s, with the spell the tormented biographer had cast with his hallucinatory written images. (...) Under Melville’s spell, Stella continued her own crusade, to recreate her own Moby Dick in three palpable dimensions, plus all those that her mind conceived with its unsuspected powers of imagination.”

The series, which explores the ways in which abstraction and figuration coexist with the material and the symbolic, has been exhibited in various museums and institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The selection for Malba comprises large-format works on paper that combine different printmaking techniques (lithography, etching, aquatint, woodcut, and drypoint, among others), paper reliefs, hand-painted colors, variations of screen prints, and collages.

Authors
Edward Shaw
Robert Wallace
Jaquelynn Bass

Technical specifications
Published by: Malba
Year: 2005
Type: Exhibition catalog
Binding: Paperback
Dimensions: 27 x 23 cm
Weight: 550 gr
Language: Bilingual - Spanish / English
Pages: 104
ISBN: 987-21445-8-3