Frank Stella
(1936–)
(–2024)
Frank Stella
1936–2024
Frank Stella (1936–2024) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker born in Malden, Massachusetts. Stella is best known for his minimalistic paintings and sculptures with the use of geometric patterns and shapes.
Stella attended Princeton University where met artists Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. In 1958, Stella moved to New York and resisted the more expressive use of paint like that of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Instead, he was drawn more to flatter surfaces like that of Barnett Newman and Jasper John’s Target paintings. Stella often used house paint and believed that the path and width of the paintbrush should guide the painting.
This new technique was used in a new series of paintings called The Black Paintings (1959), consisting of thin pinstripes separating bands of black paint. In 1960, Stella began to use aluminum and copper paint to produce his paintings, which had a larger range of colours and also became among his first shaped canvas works.
In 1962, he had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli gallery. The following year, he was artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College. In 1970, Frank Stella was the youngest artist to receive a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In the 1990s, Stella moved into more 3-D dimensional work bridging painting and sculpture. Stella’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.