Description

This first major exhibtion since 1994 of works by the Italian-American modernist Joseph Stella (1877-1946) will feature the artist’s highly original botanical subjects, which have long been overshadowed by his canonically modernist urban abstractions. Ranging from spare and intimate silverpoint studies of delicate flowers to boldly excessive, hieratic compositions referencing Stella’s spiritual life, Visionary Nature will explore and consider the transformation of rigorous observations into distilled images that are by turns intimately poetic and exuberantly vivid. Many of the over 50 works in the exhibition have not been on public view for decades. Visionary Nature will open in October 2022 and will travel to venues including the Norton Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art.