Frank Stella (Malden, Estados Unidos 1936 - Nova York, Estados Unidos 2024)
Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, USA, in 1936. He attended Princeton University, where he earned a degree in history, before moving to New York in 1958.
At the age of 22, he began his Black Paintings, each composed of concentric bands or stripes in black enamel paint on raw canvas. Four of these paintings were shown in the groundbreaking exhibition Sixteen Americans, alongside works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which bought the paintings for its collection.
In the following decades, Stella experimented with color, scale, surface and texture in his paintings, often working in series to fully explore a theme. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, he made prints, paintings and sculptures inspired by Herman Melville's classic novel Moby-Dick.
Stella began making prints in the late 1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. Stella began with lithography, making prints that expanded on formal concerns he had explored in his paintings. In 1973, he set up a print studio in his home. Stella went on to use a wide range of techniques in his editions, including screen printing, lithography, linocut, collage and hand coloring. In 2016, a major print retrospective traveled to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; Phillips Academy, Massachusetts; and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.
Stella exhibited his work internationally from 1959 and was the subject of several retrospectives, most recently in 2015 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in a show that traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. From the 1990s, Stella made sculptures for public spaces and developed architectural projects. In 2001, a monumental sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and in 2017 he was commissioned to create an installation for The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Stella's work is in major museum collections around the world, including Tate, London; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Kunstmuseum Basel; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan.
In 2009, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
Frank Stella lived and worked in New York, where he died in 2024.
Source: cristearoberts.com
