Paula Cooper Gallery, Sprüth Magers to Stage Shows for Frank Stella

Paula Cooper Gallery and Sprüth Magers will each stage an exhibition of the work of Frank Stella next spring in New York. Additionally, they will each feature a work by the late artist in their booths at Art Basel Paris later this month.

The duo of exhibitions, which are being organized with the Frank Stella Estate, will be the first gallery shows dedicated to the Stella, who died in May 2024, since the now-closed Mnuchin Gallery mounted “Homage To Frank Stella” in September of that year.

Each gallery has its own varied history with Stella. Sprüth Magers mounted two solo shows for the artist, in Berlin in 2016 and then in Los Angeles in 2018. Stella featured in group exhibitions at Paula Cooper in 1975, 1983, and 1999. More recently, he showed in 2022 at the gallery’s now-defunct outpost in Palm Beach, Florida, alongside Carl Andre and Lynda Benglis, and Paula Cooper mounted a three-work exhibition for him in 2023.

“Paula had a very long and friendly relationship with Frank,” senior partner Steve Henry told ARTnews in an interview. “She met him very early on when she came to New York, and he was, of course, very close with artists affiliated with the program—Carl Andre, David Novros, Sol LeWitt, Lynda Benglis—so they were in the same circle.”

Though she knew him personally and admired him professionally, Cooper never officially represented Stella. This new exhibition, however, “came together in a very organic way,” Henry said. “Upon his death, I think the estate took some time to think about what the next steps would be, and they wanted help. That’s something that Paula and the gallery feel we can do well. We can present the work in a different context.”

This collaboration, however, does not mark an official representation of the estate with either gallery. When asked, Henry said, “We all feel that the relationship can be more organic.”

While Stella is well-known for his contributions to postwar art history, from his now-iconic “Black Paintings” (1958—59) to his shaped canvases from the 1960s, Henry said there is still room “to expand upon his notions of radicality, his experimentation with materials and form, and provide a conversation for that in the context of some of his peers. It’s an opportunity to have an exciting kind of exchange with an artist whose work is well known and present it not necessarily new way but a different way.”

The checklists for the forthcoming New York exhibitions are still being finalized, but together they will form a broad range of works from Stella’s career, with both focusing on his work from the late 1970s and early ’80s.

At Art Basel Paris, Sprüth Magers will feature Tuftonboro III (1966), one of 11 works from Stella’s “Irregular Polygons” series, while Paula Cooper will show Zabludow Ill (1973), one of 42 pieces from his “Polish Village” series. The works will be priced at $2 million and at $950,000, respectively. Each work represents an important transitional moment within Stella’s oeuvre, from his initial shaped canvases to his creation of wall-hung works that blur the lines between painting and sculpture, which would soon become a hallmark of his work.

“What Frank did in such an extraordinary way was stretch and expand and present a questioning of the conventions of painting,” Henry said of the “Polish Village” series, which is inspired by a book he found showing images of the elaborately decorated 18th- and 19th-century wooden synagogues in Poland that would ultimately be destroyed by the end of World War II. “He goes from painting to sculpture in a really dynamic way, and the ‘Polish Village’ series sets that up.”