WASHINGTON, DC.- This exhibition marks the first museum presentation of selections from the Scarlatti Kirkpatrick Series by Frank Stella (b. 1936), one of the most influential American artists since the 1960s. The series was inspired by 18th century Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas and the writings of 20th-century American musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who helped bring the sonatas to a mainstream audience. Standing at the crossroads of painting, drawing, and sculpture, the multicolored, wall-mounted polychrome forms loop and spiral in space, evoking the sounds and rhythms of Scarlatti’s music.

The exhibition explores Stella’s new ideas by featuring eight sculptures from the series in a range of formats and sizes, from monumental, multicolored constructions up to 15-feet tall to intimate, two-foot monochromatic forms. Imbued with a sense of weightlessness, the aerodynamic forms represent a significant departure from the artist’s gravity-bound sculptures of preceding years.

Each of these works begins as a small, handcrafted model that is scanned into a computer. After refining the design, Stella begins his complex fabrication process using lightweight white resin known as protogen RPT, industrial automotive paint, and steel tubing.

“These sculptures announce a bold new chapter in Stella’s exceptional five-decade-long career,” says Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski. “In his latest inventions, he continues his longtime engagement with three-dimensional form while reinvigorating his work with color and movement.”

The strong gestural forms and sweeping color recall the painterly abstraction of Kandinsky, an artist Stella calls one of the “defining creators of 20th-century abstraction.” “Some of the armatures of these pieces are quite reminiscent of the armatures in the forms of Kandinsky,” he says.

Dubbed by critics the enfant terrible of the contemporary art scene in 1959, Stella has continued to challenge the boundaries of painting and sculpture throughout his long and productive career. Born May 12, 1936, in Malden, Mass., Stella attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and received his B.A. in history from Princeton University in 1958. After graduation he established permanent residence in New York and achieved almost immediate fame with his radical Black Paintings (1958−60). Stella’s art served as a catalyst for the development of minimalism—he was famously quoted as saying “What you see is what you see;” however, by the 1970s he changed directions and began exploring and expanding the very definition of painting away from the flat surface of the canvas into the third dimension. Beginning in the 1980s, in works such as the famous Moby Dick series, Stella introduced a dynamic, undulating wave form—a motif that takes on a new dimension in the Scarlatti Kirkpatrick Series. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Stella the National Medal of Arts in honor of his position as “one of the world’s most innovative painters and sculptors.”