Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose ever-evolving works are hailed as landmarks of the minimalist and post-painterly abstract art movements, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87 years old.
Gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who spoke with Stella's family, confirmed her death to The Associated Press. Stella's wife, Harriet McGurk, told the New York Times that he died of lymphoma.
Born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella studied at Princeton University before moving to New York City in the late 1950s.
Nic Antaya for The Boston Globe via Getty Images
At the time many prominent American artists had embraced abstract expressionism, but Stella began to explore minimalism. By the age of 23, he had created a series of flat black paintings with grid-like bands and stripes using house paint and exposed canvases that won critical acclaim.
Over the next decade, Stella's works maintained their rigorous structure, but began to incorporate curved lines and bright colors, as in his influential Protractor series, named for the geometry tool he used to create the shapes curves of large-scale paintings.
In the late 1970s, Stella began to add three-dimensionality to her visual art, using metals and other mixed media to blur the line between painting and sculpture.
Stella continued to be productive into her 80s, and her new work is currently on display at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. The colorful sculptures are massive and yet almost seem to float, made up of bright polychromatic bands that twist and coil through the space.
“The current work is amazing,” Deitch told the AP on Saturday. “He felt that the work he showed was the culmination of a decades-long effort to create a new pictorial space and fuse painting and sculpture.”
When asked in a interview 2021 Asked on CBS Sunday Morning why she always preferred abstract art to figurative art, Stella joked, “because I didn't really like people… Yeah, I mean, you know, everybody was doing that , or I didn't want to spend a lot of time drawing the model, you know when you see that poor girl sitting in the chair after she has to take off her bathrobe and everything, it's a shame!”
