Installation view of "Frank Stella" at Sprüth Magers, Berlin —
The colorful "Polish Villages" series was inspired by a book on wooden synagogues destroyed by the Nazis, with each work named after a village in Poland.
The colorful reliefs were also a nod to Russian Constructivism.
"I mean, there's no question that there's Tatlin and Rodchenko, and behind it is Malevich," said Stella, referencing some of the movement's most influential artists.
"You don't look at ["Polish Villages"] as abstract paintings, you think of them as a problem. You have to look at it and see what the point of it is," Stella says. "And the point of it is kind of obvious: it relates to painting, sculpture and architecture. So it's about form and all of the things that art-making is about."
Recently, works from "Polish Villages" were shown at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. "Frank Stella and Synagogues of Historic Poland" saw his reliefs displayed alongside pre-war photographs and drawings of the buildings that initially inspired him, as well as a recreation of a section of one of the synagogues.
The "Bali" series, made between 2002 and 2009, was inspired photographs from anthropologists Margaret Mead's and Gregory Bateson's studies of children in Bali.
"There's a kind of liberation in the forms and the shapes," Stella said. "If you're Balinese, they're not so interesting, but from the outside, it's exotic."
!["You don't look at ["Polish Villages"] as abstract paintings, you think of them as a problem. You have to look at it and see what the point of it is," Stella says. "And the point of it is kind of obvious: it relates to painting, sculpture and architecture. So it's about form and all of the things that art-making is about."](https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/160713144655-frank-stella-spruth-magers-nowe-miastro-ii.jpg?q=w_2353,h_3543,x_0,y_0,c_fill/h_447)
