Frank Stella b. 1936

Frank Stella is an American artist known as a key player in shifting the artistic trend from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. He studied history at Princeton University. Upon graduating, he moved to New York City in 1958 to pursue his art career. Stella wanted to eliminate any external meaning from his work and once famously said, "What you see is what you see."

Stella was influenced by Jasper John's work composed of flat surfaces and simple shapes. Stella's Black Paintings consist of parallel stripes done in house paint, which aimed to highlight the two dimensionality of the canvas. He later began incorporating the use of color in his printmaking and experimented in the third dimension with his large-scale, architectural sculptures. In 2009, he received the National Medal of Arts by Barack Obama for outstanding contributions to the arts. Stella has been given numerous retrospectives in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Frank Stella has work featured in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the MoMA in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the LACMA, Le Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Le Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the National Galerie in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Hara MCA in Tokyo.

Related Categories: Post-Painterly Abstraction, Art of the 1960s, Post-War American Art, Hard-Edged, Line, Form and Color, Abstract Sculpture, United States, Focus on Materials, Painting, Minimalism.