Frank Stella

BIOGRAPHY

Frank Stella is an American artist born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, he went on to Princeton University where he majored in history and painted. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artistic development, and he moved to New York in 1958 after graduation.

Stella's art was recognized for its innovation before he was twenty-five, and his works were featured in several exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He joined dealer Leo Castelli's stable of artists in 1959. Stella's art cast aside illusionistic space for the physicality of the flat surface and deviated from the traditional rectangular-shaped canvas. Stella's work includes a range of series, including the Irregular Polygon canvases, Protractor series, and Polish Village series.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Stella's minimalism became baroque, with curving forms, DayGlo colors, and scrawled brushstrokes. His prints of these decades combined various printmaking and drawing techniques. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Stella's art has been included in several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

In addition to his extensive career in traditional art mediums, Frank Stella has recently expanded his artistic horizons into the world of NFTs. The legendary painter, sculptor, and printmaker is now offering a series of NFTs called "Geometries," which showcases 22 three-dimensional forms rendered in white.

Stella has received numerous honors, including an invitation from Harvard University to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1983–84. These talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986. The artist continues to live and work in New York.

ARTWORKS from our ETH collection