During June of 1980, the month Frank Stella's Polar Coordinates for Ronnie Peterson (a series of lithograph/screen prints titled in memory of a good friend and Grand Prix racer) was published by Petersburg Press, the artist began drawing and maquettes for a new group of metal-relief paintings that would also be related to the world of international automobile racing. The resulting Circuit series comprised paintings with titles such as Pergusa, Talladega, Estoril, and Imola, each of which names racetracks in North and South America, Europe, and South Africa. For Stella, who has followed Grand Prix racing since the mid-1970s and has mixed art with sport in the hand painting of BMW race cars, the series title was at once a reference to high-speed racing courses and to the complex formal connections between painted shapes in the metal constructions.
Concentrated Streak
The circuit series is one of Stella's most extended projects to date. Consisting of ninety-five relief paintings, it was completed in 1984 over a period of four years (although the majority were painted during 1981 and 1982). Based upon twenty-two of twenty-four original foamcore maquettes, twenty-seven of the paintings in the series are enlargements of the maquettes in scales of one and a quarter to one and are executed in aluminum. Sixty-eight others were enlarged by factors of either three or sometimes four and three-quarters and were realized in aluminum or magnesium-faced honeycomb aluminum. Acknowledged by Stella as the "most concentrated streak of work that I've ever had," the circuit series is cited by William Rubin—who organized the major retrospectives of Stella's work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970 and 1987—as the "artist's most successful group of paintings yet."
Between 1967 and mid-1980, when Stella began the Circuit paintings, he had produced well over one hundred print editions in collaborations with Gemini G.E.L. (Los Angeles), Tyler Graphics (now Mt. Kisco, New York), and Petersburg Press (London and New York). In 1982 he would be given his first major print retrospective. Acknowledged for a sustained and ambitious commitment to printmaking, he was praised for a compelling print oeuvre. As had been his practice since he first began making prints in 1967, Stella followed the Circuit paintings with a series of related prints, although in this case he generated not one but two complete series—the Circuits and the Swan Engravings—as well as Yellow Journal and Green Journal, two editions related to the Swan Engravings.
If the Circuit paintings are one of Stella's most extended series, the related prints he produced, forty-four in all over a three and a half year period, were equally numerous and time-consuming. In no other instance has he responded so prolifically and variously in both paint and print media to an initial pictorial idea. Within the prints, for example, the dark expressionist angularities of the Swan Engravings are considerably distinct from the kaleidoscopic lyricism of the Circuits.
The Circuits print series is now exhibited for the first time in its entirety by the Walker Art Center. This opportunity allows a close scrutiny and accounting of their broad yet unified range of expression. The Circuits, more than any other print series, epitomize the complex technical, conceptual, and visual dialectic of Stella's prints and paintings. The prints reveal the processes of invention with which he reworks a
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