Symbolic shapes directly inform Frank Stella’s sculptural practice as seen in works across the current survey “Frank Stella: Sculpture” on view through November 1, 2022. “K.263” (2016), for one, harnesses the image and logic of the triumphal arch. Scraping 28.5 feet, the aluminum and stainless-steel structure usurps the iconography of the monument that traditionally demarcates nationalistic pride or military conquest. The title, however, follows from the notational system of the Scarlatti K series (which across scale and media seem to be united by assemblage or aggregation), transposing the honorific from the world of political machinations to that of Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas (the Italian composer, a bridge figure between the Baroque and Classical period, is akin to Stella’s own straddling of sculpture/painting, modernism/postmodernism, minimalism/maximalism). Possibly evoking inverted scores, the curled and spiraled aluminum tubing suggests a helmet— another martial association. It is this ebbing flux and unresolved potential which underpins Stella’s transformation of this loaded sculptural genre into an elusive rather than dogmatic monument. In this way, K.263 opens that particular gratification of discovering figures in cloud’s illusions (or as Stella puts it, “it’s the age-old story of ‘you’re going to see something in it’”). What’s more, the aluminum tubes, a recurring material that the artist manipulates in the studio, track back to the metallic bands of his early career Aluminum Painting series, which along with the Copper series, evidence a nascent predilection for a material-based and spatial painting. Image: Frank Stella, K.263, 2016 Aluminum and stainless steel 343 x 322 x 217“ (871.2 x 817.9 x 551.2 cm) FS2016.029 Text: Megan Kincaid / @meganakincaid Image credit: Oliver Campbell / @olivrrrr #frankstella #frankstellasculpture