M HKA Ensembles

Painting, 311.9 x 187 cm.

Collection: Collection VAM, Eindhoven (Inv. no. 0457).

Stella’s 'Black Paintings', including 'Tuxedo Junction', consist of unprimed canvasses with symmetrical patterns of black strokes.

The artist exchanged the free, spontaneous gestures of the action painters for cool, rational actions. The paintings are structured according to the principle of deduction: the sizes of elements inside the painting are extracted from the sizes and proportions of the painting as a whole; the width of the stripes is based on the width of the frame where the canvas is stretched. The romanticism associated with action painting is even further suppressed through the way Stella makes his paintings: he uses household paint, and marks out areas with tape in order to obtain straight lines.

The titles he gives to his works also have an associative function. In this way, the ‘black’ from the title is not only a colour, but also a carrier of meaning.