Quathlamba クォスランバ

With his works of the "Black series" featuring black stripes started in late 1958 and terminated in 1960, Stella brought in the age of Minimal Art. In order to remove the distance between the painting and the viewer that is created by the act of interpretation and to allow a work of art to be experienced as it is, he adopted regular patterns which do not call for interpretation and the "shaped canvas" which presents a form in itself and not as a painted element within the picture.
This work is one of the nine pieces in the "Notched V" series produced in 1964. The shaped canvas, which has been mostly symmetrical in the earlier works, is given a directed motion by the way the three equilateral triangles each notched in the V shape are joined together. The movement, together with the use of lustrous metallic paint, anticipates Stella's subsequent works in which he pursues the immediate artistic experience within the interaction between the painting and the surrounding space. "Quathlamba" is the name of a 19th-century British clipper.