“Marianne Boesky Gallery is sad to announce that Frank Stella died on May 4, 2024 at the age of 87. A giant of post-war abstract art, Stella’s extraordinary, ever-evolving work investigated the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and objectivity”, declared the gallery through its social channels that represented the artist in New York born in 1936 in Malden in the United States from Italian parents. Stella lived in the New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village and until shortly before her death worked in a studio in the Hudson Valley near Newburgh.
The artist Frank Stella and early fame
Frank Stella was just 20 years old when he achieved fame as soon as he left Princeton University (where he studied history and painting under the tutelage of Stephen Greene and William Seitz) with his well-known Black Paintings which responded to the rise of abstract expressionism in America at the end of the 1950s, which saw, among others, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock as its main representatives. In those years other artists such as Kenneth Noland, Robert Motherwell, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman also created monochromatic striped paintings but only Stella thanks to the collective exhibition (in which he was the youngest) Sixteen Americans from 1959 at MoMA – which he purchased The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, IIone of the Black Paintings – was consecrated as the pioneer of minimalist art. He himself compared his paintings to the plays of Samuel Beckett, where he declared (in a 1972 interview) there are “very simple situations where not much happens”.
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Frank Stella and the first shaped canvases
From 1960 Stella began cutting corners in his works giving life to real shaped canvases and thus painting on trapezoids, pentagons, hexagons and other complex geometric shapes. 10 years later, in 1970, MoMA dedicated a solo exhibition to him recording “an increasingly playful show, in which the stripes expanded into shapes that shocked the frames and the sober colors came to life”, as the art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2015. From here the artist added elements of collage to his paintings until they became three-dimensional, true sculptural forms which led him to create sculptures in steel, fibreglass, cast aluminum and plastic. Between 1986 and 1997 Frank Stella produced over 100 works of art (paintings, lithographs and sculptures) inspired by the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, telling in 2014 that the series “it changed my mind about abstraction. Abstraction did not have to be limited to some sort of rectilinear geometry or simple curved geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with shapes. It wouldn’t be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of shapes and colors would give you a sense of narrative. This type of approach excited me”.
Caterina Angelucci
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