Frank Stella American artist, master of post-painterly abstraction Date of Birth: 12.05.1936 Country: USA

Biography of Frank Stella

Frank Stella, an American artist and master of post-painterly abstraction, was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. He grew up in a family of a gynecologist and began his artistic journey by studying painting at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 1950 to 1954. Stella then pursued history at Princeton University from 1954 to 1958.

After completing his studies, Stella primarily lived in New York City where he initially worked as a draftsman and designer to support himself. It was during the late 1950s that Stella's distinct style started to take shape, particularly in his series of "black paintings." These works featured surfaces filled with black stripes separated by narrow white intervals. In this period, Stella focused on the exploration of pure visuality, experimenting with the arrangement of these stripes.

In 1959, Stella gained significant support from Leo Castelli, a prominent New York gallery owner. This support propelled Stella's career forward. Soon after, in 1960, he created series of "aluminum" and "copper" paintings, featuring stripes painted with colors resembling these metallic shades. As part of his artistic development, Stella moved away from traditional rectangular formats to create "shaped canvases" in the form of letters L, T, or U.

In 1971, Stella turned to historical themes, specifically inspired by the memory of the Holocaust, with his series "Polish Villages." He approached this subject through texturally constructed non-representational reliefs reminiscent of the roofs of wooden synagogues. Over time, Stella's series, such as the labyrinthine "Concentric Squares" (from 1983) and others, saw an increasing emphasis on vibrant polychromy.

In the mid-1970s, Stella began creating large-scale, intricately curved paintings, using shipbuilding templates to delineate their forms, as seen in his series "Exotic Birds" (from 1976). Later, he introduced relief elements by incorporating cuttings of steel pipes and wire mesh into these compositions. Paying tribute to constructivism, Stella produced numerous planar (lithographic) and relief variations based on the graphic works of El Lissitzky from 1982 to 1984.

The early geometric style of "hard-edge" gave way to a more romantic and biomorphic manner in Stella's later works, such as the spatially three-dimensional "Wave Series" (from 1985 to 1989). In these pieces, the boundaries between painting and decorative art, characteristic of post-painterly abstraction, became blurred.

Overall, Frank Stella's artistic career has been marked by his innovative exploration of abstraction, constantly pushing the boundaries of traditional forms and concepts.