Formally, the star form can be found throughout Stella’s early output, as early as 1961. In recent years, Stella’s has returned to the form with a series of star sculptures that present the latest leap in the artist’s forward-moving trajectory and continued exploration of mass, composition and spatial relationships. Stella’s multi-faceted preoccupation with the motif will be the subject of Frank Stella’s Stars: A Survey opening at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in September 2020. Since the 1950s, Frank Stella’s practice has consistently explored the boundaries of visual language, pushing the two-dimensional into three, monochrome into color, square into round, painting into sculpture and beyond. The Star series, fabricated in collaboration with Ernest Mourmans, Giswil, Switzerland, presents the latest leap in Stella’s forward-moving trajectory. Here, sculpture and architecture blend into grandiose forms that both occupy and shape space on a lofty scale, posing aesthetic questions about mass, composition and spatial relationships. Rendered in marine lumber, polished aluminum and a combination of black matte and glossy carbon fiber, these works’ simple materials belie their elegant complexity. Indeed, suggesting the swirling cosmos and celestial bursts, these works move past the rich historical, musical and geographical references of Stella’s oeuvre into the realm of the universe itself. Notably, these works look back while they look forward. Stripped of color, they recall the minimal purity and important early investigation of simple pattern and line found in the artist’s famous Black, Aluminum and Copper paintings (1958-1961). Formally, the star form can be found throughout Stella’s early output. Black Paintings such as Arbeit Macht Frei (1958; private collection) and Zambezi (1959; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) hint at it. The earliest recorded plans for a star-shaped canvas can be seen in a sketch Stella completed in 1961, Untitled (list of Copper Paintings, 1960-61, and Purple Paintings, 1961)(fig. 1), in which drawings for two starshaped paintings are included. It was two years later in 1963 that the first of these were realized, Plant City (fig. 2)(Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Port Tampa City (private collection) from the Dartmouth Paintings in metallic zinc chromate and red lead paint, respectively, on star-shaped canvases with eight points each. In 1964-1965, similar imagery is reiterated in the Moroccan Paintings, with brightly multicolored squares as well as stripped-down compositions reduced to black, white and grey. From the later 60s forward, we see Stella break the confines of recognizable forms, moving beyond the two-dimensional painted and shaped canvases and into the three-dimensional realm of architecture. Beginning with the Polish Village series (1971- 1973), Stella denies legible form, eventually moving into the Cones and Pillars series in the 80s, the Moby Dick series in the 90s, and then returning to his early commitment to abstraction in the Bali series (2002-2009), essentially three dimensional line drawings in space made of aluminum, steel, plastic, carbon fiber and titanium. The star form re-emerges in the Scarlatti K series (since 2006), appearing again and again on a more intimate level in a number of these rhythmic sculptural compositions. The 2014 works push the star form further; here, it bursts forth into space, insisting on its autonomy with mass and scale. A culmination of Stella’s explorations over the past decades, stripped to their bare essence and then inflated, the Star series thus presents a compelling continuation as much as an experimental departure; this exemplary characteristic can be applied to Stella’s overarching creative approach and the artist’s commitment to building upon his own aesthetic challenges and resolutions.