Frank Stella: Hacilar

In his essay for the brochure which accompanies the exhibition, Robert Rosenblum writes:

It may come as less of a surprise then to learn that more recently, as we entered a new millennium, Stella has plumbed even further back into the history of pictorial art, arriving at its awesome roots in the images miraculously surviving on the walls of caves. In 1999, Stella wrote about his visit to Lascaux on the occasion of his wife Harriet’s birthday, a revelation to him of prehistoric pictorial grandeur that, he claimed, was easily the rival of the best Renaissance painting, including the Sistine Chapel. And this magical world of primal art-making continued to kindle his imagination. The more recent excavations, begun in the 1950s, of Neolithic towns - Çatal Hüyük, Hacilar - on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey were added to his expanding image-bank, prompting new sequences of work that continue to defy traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture, between optical illusions and tangible, material fact.