In Frank Stella’s York Factory Sketch V (c.1969–70), architectonic semicircles interlock across multiple axes to form a dense scheme of overlapping and interrupted bands – a dynamic network that remains rooted in essential geometry even as it appears to confound logic. Expressing an exuberant collision of colour and line, this monumental painting belongs to the artist’s acclaimed ‘Saskatchewan’ series – a body of work produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s that marked Stella’s departure from his earlier commitment to straight lines. Demonstrating his evolving approach to spatial complexity, York Factory Sketch V prefigures the volumetric proportions of Stella’s later reliefs and sculptural works, while simultaneously expanding upon his explorations of the relationship between figure and ground within the two-dimensional image plane.

Structured through radial geometries of vaulted arcs, York Factory Sketch V operates as an important variation on Stella’s renowned ‘Protractor’ series (1967–71). After nearly a decade exploring reductive minimalism through a vocabulary of straight lines, stripes and right angles – articulated across his successive ‘Black Paintings’, ‘Concentric Squares’ and ‘Irregular Polygons’, each of which shook the New York art scene in the late 1950s and 1960s – the ‘Protractors’ marked a decisive shift, introducing the circle into his geometric lexicon. Using a beam compass constructed from a ten-foot length of quarter-inch lath, Stella planned a body of 93 works, each named after an ancient Middle Eastern city or monument. Inspired by his travels to Iran in 1963, he drew upon the interwoven circular plans of these ancient cities, which he likened to ‘snakes swallowing their tails’. Stella envisioned 31 canvas shapes, each realised in three different design principles based on the curve: ‘interlaces’, ‘rainbows’ and ‘fans’. The ‘interlaces’ proved the most successful in employing an inconsistent layering of half-circles to defy the illusion of spatial recession, adhering to Clement Greenberg’s mandate of flatness in painting while skilfully compressing and suspending movement on the planar image field.

Representing a distinct development on the ‘Protractors’, York Factory Sketch V belongs to a smaller body of work known as the ‘Saskatchewan’ pictures, conceived by Stella during his tenure at the Emma Lake Workshop at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina, in the summer of 1967. Titling each work in the series after a location in the Canadian province, Stella makes reference in York Factory Sketch V to the former trade hub in Hudson Bay, Manitoba. While in Canada, Stella lacked access to the materials he typically used to construct shaped stretchers – a practical limitation that gave rise to conceptual innovation: the semicircular motifs of the ‘Protractors’ were adapted to fit within the confines of a rectangular format, altering the reciprocal relationship between surface design and canvas shape that had, until then, characterised Stella’s approach to painting. Commending this new development, art historian Robert Rosenblum described how ‘these restless arcs strain their boundaries, exchanging positions in depth, brusquely switching roles of visual priority, pressing inward and outward, forward and backward for completion of their fragmentary shapes and abruptly interrupted energies’ (Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Penguin, Middlesex, 1971, p.51).

Michael Fried’s 1963 observation that ‘Stella’s paintings arise out of an unprecedented awareness of their own perimeters’ (quoted in Rosenblum, p.25) is brought into heightened effect in York Factory Sketch V. Organising curvilinear and concentric forms within a panoramic rectangular format, the work brings multiple geometries into convergence, challenging the interplay between internal design and canvas boundary. In doing so, it reconfigures the precedents of ‘all-over’ painting and gestures towards a notion of infinite extendibility. As the structural complexity of Stella’s designs increased, his use of colour became essential in maintaining the oscillation of forms across the picture surface. In York Factory Sketch V, Stella’s pencil lines remain visible in the unpainted margins that delineate each coloured band, animating a tension between positive and negative space. While Stella had previously planned his designs on paper, he increasingly came to rely on intuition during the painting process, using the curves to allow colour to travel.

In the early 1970s, Stella collaborated with Gemini G.E.L. to create several screenprint editions titled ‘York Factory’, featuring similar configurations of interwoven curved bands and enriched by extensive screenings of colour applied in alternating saturated and transparent inks. These popular prints evidence the significance of colour dynamics for Stella and serve to intensify the immediacy of his rare painted ‘studies’.