Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is one of the most important living artists. Painter, sculptor and printmaker, he is celebrated for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.
Born the oldest of three children to first-generation Italian-American parents, Frank Stella began learning to paint from the abstractionist Patrick Morgan in his sophomore year of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. While earning a degree in history at Princetown University, Stella continued taking art classes and was introduced to the New York Art scene by painter Stephen Greene and art historian William Seitz, dominated at the time by Abstract Expressionists.
After graduating, he moved to the Lower East Side and almost immediately attracted significant amounts of attention from the art world. He joined dealer Leo Castelli’s roster of artists in 1959. Deploying a monochromatic palette (like in his first major series Back paintings) and flat application of paint, with emphasis on form rather than content, his early paintings are often credited with launching Minimalism.
In 1970, Stella was the youngest artist to have a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Following this exhibition, Stella again explored new artistic avenues, this time incorporating collage and relief into his paintings.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Stella expanded his three-dimensional paintings into increasingly explosive, vividly colored, and multifaceted pieces, while continuing his work in printmaking.
