“My own works for the [Polish Village] series began as simple forms on a flat plane. In the end, the final works are a kind of projected relief, if you hang them on the wall, or architecture models if you lay them on the ground. This was the first time, I suppose, that I directly dealt with relief.”

—Frank  Stella

Executed in 1973, Ostropol I belongs to Frank Stella’s acclaimed Polish Village series and marks a turning point in the artist’s practice. Having gained critical recognition for his austere Minimalist paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s, Stella reoriented his work after his landmark 1970 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition, which surveyed Stella’s career when he was only 34 years old, prompted a moment of profound reflection and departure: rather than refining the flat, formalist painting that had brought him fame, the artist started afresh and began to embrace spatial complexity and architectural reference. The Polish Village series (1970–1974) grew out of his interest in the vernacular wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe obliterated by the Nazis during World War II. The present work takes its title from the town of Ostropol (now in Ukraine), once home to a vibrant Jewish community destroyed during the Third Reich. Stella approached these synagogues not only as subjects for commemoration, but also as compositional frameworks to be iterated through serial variations; three works bear the name Ostropol, including this piece. Although he continued to call the Polish Village “paintings,” the works like Ostropol I are three-dimensional, built objects, meticulously constructed from felt, wood, and painted canvas—evidence of Stella’s increasingly sculptural and industrial engagement with pictorial form. Of the full-scale variations of the Polish Village paintings created between 1970 and 1973, at least fourteen are held in major institutions worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

“[T]he Polish pictures opened things up for me so that I was able to use my gift for structure with something that modernism hadn't really exploited before, the idea that paintings could be constructed, made by picture-building.... Building a picture was something natural for me. Build it and then paint it. It was a job I was well suited for.”

—Frank  Stella

Frank Stella first encountered the subject of Eastern Europe’s wooden synagogues through his longtime friend, architect Richard Meier, who gave him a translated copy of Wooden Synagogues (1959) by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka. The book documented dozens of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century wooden structures demolished during the Holocaust—among them, the synagogue in Ostropol, built circa 1600s. Captivated by archival images of these architectural marvels, Stella was struck by their interlocking carpentry and ornamental complexity. While his earlier paintings had only suggested relief through planar color bands, the Polish Village series marked a shift to full physical depth, as Stella began constructing wall-mounted assemblages that hovered somewhere between painting and sculpture. He drew direct influence from the wooden structures’ rhythmic geometries, layered facades, and intricate latticework—visual motifs that found new form in his dimensional, color-blocked reliefs. In particular, the Ostropol synagogue’s stacked gables, staircases, and galleries offered Stella both a visual rhythm and a new spatial vocabulary, mirrored in the jutting, angled planes of Ostropol I. The result is at once rigorously abstract and faintly architectural, a hybrid form that invites structural readings without fully surrendering to representation. 

Incorporating carpentry materials such as wood and felt, Ostropol I exemplifies Frank Stella’s ongoing investment in materials drawn from outside traditional studio practice, a tendency that had characterized his work since the late 1950s. In employing this media, he found a material language that echoed both the craftsmanship and structural ingenuity of the synagogues that inspired the Polish Village series. Stella was captivated by the builders’ use of modular components and geometric order—principles that resonated deeply with his own ambitions at the time. “I am building a painting,” he remarked. “These are constructions that come from the buildings themselves. I was very interested in drawings of hard-edge geometric abstraction. I wanted to take them from two-dimensional to three- dimensional—to build a painting.”ⁱ Each work in the series, including Ostropol I, began with a drawing, followed by a paperboard maquette and a full-sized wooden construction, and culminated in a full-scale object painted in vivid acrylics and designed to project into the viewer’s space. The use of wood further tethered the present work to the architectural traditions of Eastern Europe shtetels, which utilized pine, oak and spruce logs from local forests to erect these timber structures. Through its dynamic geometry and handcrafted construction, Ostropol I pays tribute to the ingenuity of carpenters while also serving as a poignant elegy for the vanished community who once built and inhabited this sacred space.

The present work stands as a striking example of Stella’s effort to translate memory, architecture, and abstraction into built form. “These synagogues were destroyed during the war, and there were two things interesting about them,” Stella elucidated. “One was that there was a kind of geometry in the construction, the wooden construction, which I would call interlocking-ness: interlocking parts that are interesting as a kind of geometry. The other thing that was compelling was that the trace of the destruction of these synagogues was from Berlin to Warsaw to Moscow. The development of abstraction in the twentieth century traces that same path, from Moscow to Warsaw to Berlin and back.”ⁱⁱ In this way, Stella situates Ostropol I not only within the lineage of architectural reconstruction, but within a trajectory of modern abstraction rooted in Constructivism and Suprematism. Although the series began with a deep admiration for the inventiveness and craftsmanship that defined these wooden buildings—central to Jewish communal life in prewar Eastern Europe—its ambitions soon extended beyond historical tribute. As Stella declared, it was “about the obliteration of an entire culture.”ⁱⁱⁱ

ⁱ Frank Stella, quoted in Carol Salus, “Frank Stella's Polish Village Series and Related Works: Heritage and Alliance,” Shofar, vol. 28, no. 2, 2010, p. 146.
ⁱⁱ Frank Stella, quoted in “Understanding Stella: The Polish Village series,” Phaidon, January 29, 2018, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Frank Stella quoted in Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965: A Catalogue Raisonne, New York, 1986, p. 40.