Frank Stella, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker known for his work in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction, passed away on Saturday.
His wife, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, revealed the artist died at his home in the West Village of Manhattan due to lymphoma.
Stella was born on 13 May 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, to first-generation Italian-American parents. His mother was a landscape painter, and his father was a gynecologist and a painting enthusiast.
Stella was a dominant figure in the industry, whose relentless innovations and explorations of colors made him an endlessly discussed individual. In early 20s, his large-scale black paintings, precisely black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas, took the world by storm.
William Rubin, the art historian, was almost mesmerized by the magical presence of Stella’s paintings. Stella also created an unofficial motto to interpret his minimalist work, “what you see is what you see.”
In the early 1960s, Stella proved himself a master of reinvention after he animated the stripe formula with vibrant colors and shaped canvases. Stella’s Protractor series is one of his outstanding works, making him a god of the sixties art world, exalting tastes for reductive form, daunting scale, and florid artificial color.”
The series includes more than 100 mural-size paintings crowded with overlapping half-circles of brilliant colors. It was first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan in 1967.
Through relentless innovation and unwavering commitment to pushing artistic boundaries, Frank Stella left an indelible mark on contemporary art, ensuring his legacy endures for generations to come.
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