Frank Stella, Haunch of Venison - review

A pioneer of minimalism, Stella had had a remarkable decade leading up to that honour, each group of works steadily moving painting in new directions.  

Such momentum is hard to maintain, however, and so it proved with Stella, whose work from the Eighties onwards I find gaudily unsatisfying.

Haunch of Venison's mini-retrospective avoids a chronology of Stella's career to date, showing works from different eras and groups together.

It's a smart move: it avoids creating a show that feels like a downward spiral, and helps us grapple with Stella's later works in the company of his earlier achievements.

It begins with the wonderful Black Paintings of the late Fifties and the shaped, striped canvases in muted tones that followed. In these Stella took on the Abstract Expressionists' mantle but avoided their spiritual associations - "what you see is what you see", he famously said.

Colour increasingly crept into the paintings along with a bolder response to shape - Basra Gate I (1968), a work from Stella's Protractor series (canvases shaped like the mathematical tool) shows a jarring colour sense, with a deep green, pale blue and ochre sitting uneasily alongside each other. This increasingly polychromatic bent was emphasised in the Concentric Square series of the Sixties and Seventies, such as Lettre sur les aveugles II (1974), where Stella plays with the spatial effects of a range of hues.

Viewing the Concentric Squares alongside more recent works, you see how his career has consisted of a gradual unravelling of the minimalist restrictions which had proved so successful early on, leading eventually to a riot of colour and form that leaps from the walls in the Eighties and Nineties works.

Stella attempted to fuse an abstract language with Baroque exuberance here, and they buzz with palpable energy. But while Haunch's reappraisal of them in this absorbing show makes greater sense of their relation to the earlier work, it fails, alas, to make them any more likeable.

Until November 19 (020 7495 5050, haunchofvenison.com)

Frank Stella
Haunch of Venison
W1