Marlene Dumas on Frank Stella
Thinking about Blocks, Bars, Crosses, Crossing out and Crossing over….
The Politics of Geometry versus The Geography of Politics.
I’ve always enjoyed making links to other artists.
This often shows through my choice of titles, which to me is like a child’s game.
The similarities between these works are often only cosmetic.
Take my ‘Stella’ and compare it to the early Frank Stella’s I so admire for their cool American beauty of (seemingly) effortless clarity.
My Stella is a figure that can’t decide whether to be solid matter of fact or just a figure of speech. A figure caught between a flat space and a deeper space – a hard, aloof space and an illusional emotional space. It is not about which is the better place to be.
It is not even about making a ‘she’ out of a ‘he’.
It is just my way to pay my dues to all the different types of Stella’s that have crossed my mind.
Frank Stella | Notes on All is Fair in Love and War. Originally published in Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts | On Others, second edition (revised and expanded) Koenig Books London, 2014 [Written on the occasion of the exhibition All is Fair in Love and War at Jack Tilton|Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, 2001, but at the time unpublished].