Calatrava & Stella

Architizer News

Calatrava & Stella

April 14, 2011

Photo courtesy of www.palladium.de, Barbara Burg/Oliver Schuh.

Architects and painters have collaborated to beautiful effect (even if the interpersonal relationship didn’t blossom; see: Philip Johnson for the Rothko Chapel in Houston). Opening tomorrow at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is another such duo — exuberant Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava with minimalist American painter Frank Stella.

Read on for more details:

“Stella & Calatrava: The Michael Kohlhaas Curtain” suspends a 98-foot mural by Stella — one painted in a markedly less minimalist vein than the work you may be familiar with — inside a Calatrava-designed steel orb.

Calatrava describes the beauty of the installation as it “plays with the human scale.” The canvas is painted on both sides and by “putting the canvas inside of the sculptural ring and enclosing it you almost get an infinite dimension because there is no beginning and no end.”

After the exhibition’s closing date of August 14, the installation will move to the IAACC Pablo Serrano Museum in Zaragoza, Spain, where it will be part of a larger exhibition of both artists’ works. According to curator Cristina Carrillo de Albernoz, also on display will be “several never-before-seen sculptures in motion created by Calatrava specifically for the exhibition.”