This series has been tracing the artists who shaped Jim Ferrari's sculptural language. This entry turns to Frank Stella, and the sense of motion, color, and controlled chaos he brought to sculpture in the second half of his career.
Stella started as a painter, and a famously austere one — his early black paintings, flat bands of pinstripe on raw canvas, are some of the coolest, most minimal images in postwar American art. What makes him such an interesting figure decades later is how completely he reversed course. By the 1970s and 80s he was building work that was the opposite of restrained: loud color, overlapping curves, layered relief and, eventually, fully freestanding sculpture made from smooth ribbons of painted metal twisted and knotted around each other in space.
You can see that shift clearly in the two pieces pictured below — a wall-mounted relief built from overlapping bands of pattern and color, its surface a collage of curved shapes fighting for the same space, and a freestanding sculpture beside it, ribbons of red, green, blue, and gold looping and colliding around an armature you can barely see underneath all that motion. Stella drafted many of these forms using French curves and ship-building templates scaled dramatically up, then let the shapes overlap and interlock almost the way a collage does — each band keeping its own color and identity even as it gets tangled up with a dozen others.
Frank Stella, Moby Dick, from the Wave series.
The effect is closer to jazz improvisation than to a single controlled composition — voices layered on top of one another, each distinct, the whole thing held together by energy rather than symmetry. Stella leaned into that instinct most explicitly in his Wave series, more than a hundred prints, reliefs, and sculptures he made beginning in the mid-1980s, many of them titled after chapters of Melville's novel — Moby Dick, pictured above, is one of them. He wasn't illustrating the book. Each title worked more like a tuning fork — a mood, a texture, a piece of the novel's obsession and chaos — that he then let loose into a composition with no literal whale, ship, or sea in sight.
Jim Ferrari's Berman's Breach picks up that same thread, but pulls the whale back out of the abstraction and into the room. Cast in dark, polished metal, a humpback erupts from a churn of jagged spray at its base, one long pectoral fin thrown wide, its throat pleats rendered in warm, wood-toned bronze against the cool blue-black of its back. Breach is doing real work in the title: it's the precise term for a whale launching itself clear of the water, and a quiet echo of a novel built entirely around one animal's refusal to be caught, described, or fully known.
Jim Ferrari, Berman's Breach.
Where Stella took Melville's chapters as raw material for pure abstraction, Ferrari goes the other way, giving the whale its body back — but the underlying impulse sits close to Stella's own. Both use a body of water-borne motion and obsession as an occasion for something bigger than illustration: for Stella, what color and curve could do once cut loose from the text; for Ferrari, what a single explosive instant of motion can look like held still in a material that's normally heavy and inert. It's a willingness to reach for a big, literary, slightly theatrical subject and let the material carry the emotional charge — not a template Jim is following, but a question that keeps resurfacing in different ways across his own studio work.
“I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.”
— Frank Stella