“My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there, is there… what you see is what you see.” This is how Frank Stella conceived of art, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose constantly evolving works are hailed as milestones of the minimalist and post-pictorial abstraction art movements, who died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan at the age of 87 due to of lymphoma, according to his wife, Harriet McGurk.
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936, Stella burst onto the New York City art scene in the late 1950s with her radical black stripe paintings, challenging the conventions of dominant Abstract Expressionism and laying the groundwork for Minimalism. . Early works such as Black Stripe (1959) and Die Fahne (1959), with their simple geometric forms and absence of pictorial references, generated controversy but also hailed Stella as a bold innovator.
Throughout her prolific career spanning more than six decades, Stella explored a wide range of media and techniques, transcending the boundaries of painting and encompassing sculpture, printmaking, installation and design. Her work was characterized by her constant search for innovation, experimenting with materials, shapes and scales, always challenging preconceived notions about art and its expressive potential.
In the late 1970s, Stella began adding three-dimensionality to her visual art, using metals and other mixed media to blur the boundary between painting and sculpture. Stella continued producing well into her 80s, and his new work is currently on view at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York. The colorful sculptures are enormous and yet almost appear to float, made up of brilliant polychromatic bands that twist and coil in space. “The current work is amazing,” Deitch told the AP on Saturday. “He felt that the work he was showing was the culmination of a decades-long effort to create a new pictorial space and merge painting and sculpture.”
Among his most celebrated works are the metal sculptures of the Protractor series (1960s), the vibrant paintings of the Pattern series (1970s), and the monumental installations of the Concentric Squares series (1980s).
Beyond his artistic output, Stella was an avid art collector, a dedicated philanthropist, and a tireless advocate for arts education. In 1987, he founded the Stella Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports emerging artists, promotes art research and conservation, and organizes traveling exhibitions that spread his and other artists’ legacy.
Stella’s impact on contemporary art is as important as her work inspired generations of artists to challenge boundaries, explore new visual languages, and rethink the role of art in society. Her legacy endures in the collections of the world’s main museums, in the influence she exerts on contemporary artists and in the deep mark she left on the history of art.
