Artists

Frank Stella is a post-war American artist born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936. He is recognised for his innovative use of shape, composition, and colour in his art. Stella studied art at the Phillips Academy in Andover before pursuing a history degree from Princeton University. He graduated in 1958 and moved to New York City, where he still resides.

Stella’s early works were abstract expressionist, but he turned towards minimalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s after being inspired by Jasper Johns. He garnered early acclaim with his Black Paintings series, where he painted straight, thin white stripes on a black background. These works led him to become known as a hard-edge painter. In 1959, at twenty-three, he was the youngest person included in the Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA). In 1970, he became the youngest artist to ever hold a retrospective exhibition at MoMA; he was thirty-four.

As his career progressed, Stella experimented with new canvas shapes, which evolved into works that protruded from the wall, transforming two-dimensional artworks into three-dimensional ones. He also brightened his colour palette, including using fluorescent paints. In the late 1970s, Stella abandoned minimalism for maximalism and started incorporating curves and arabesques into his mixed-media reliefs. His use of media expanded from house and car paint (which reflected his early career as a house and boat painter) to aluminium and fibreglass. In the 1990s, he began creating large-scale freestanding sculptures.

Stella is one of the most influential living American artists. He holds numerous honours and awards, including the 2009 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. Stella’s works are in countless private and public collections around the world, like the Tate in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, among others.