Details — Click to read
Original poster produced on the occasion of Frank Stella’s 1983 exhibition at the Musee Departemental des Vosges, Épinal, France. This vintage poster reproduces the artist’s 1971 mixed media work Konskie II, Polish village. Reminiscent of Russian Constructivist paintings, the imagery is minimalist and geometric, in red, orange, green, blue, ran, yellow, and blue, boldly enclosed in black.
Konskie II was part of a group of wall works constructed from felt, canvas, and cardboard, inspired by 18th century synagogues in Europe that were destroyed by the Nazis during WWII. Stella remarked that he related to the tenacity with which these buildings have been rebuilt. “These synagogues were destroyed during the war, and there were two things interesting about them,” explained Stella during a 2016 lecture in Havana. “One was that there was a kind of geometry in the construction, the wooden construction, which I would call interlocking-ness: interlocking parts that are interesting as a kind of geometry. The other thing that was compelling was that the trace of the destruction of these synagogues was from Berlin to Warsaw to Moscow. The development of abstraction in the twentieth century traces that same path, from Moscow to Warsaw to Berlin and back.”
