Mixed medium on aluminium and magnesium

168.9 x 146.1 x 63.5 cm

The Chart (D-14, 1X) is a part of Frank Stella’s Moby Dick series, lasting from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. As aluminium sheets are entangled with their vibrant designs applied through painting, spraying, and scribbling, the resulting sculpture is simultaneously abstract and defined in form, a culmination of Stella’s decades worth of lessons in painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Stella’s series-defining wave-whale shape can be seen in his interpolation of the metal sheets as they are layered over one another, capturing how the white whale looms in Captain Ahab’s increasingly frantic psyche as he obsesses over catching the whale in the forty-fourth chapter of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, which this work is named after. Stella’s incorporation of such narrative fragments thus directly references Wassily Kandinsky’s system of composition.