Frank Stella, a prominent Italian-American artist, played a fundamental role in the artistic movement known as “post-abstract painting”. His work anticipates numerous elements of minimalism, a fact that has led some to consider him a minimalist, despite the fact that most of his subsequent works do not strictly adhere to this current.
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian origin, Stella attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, before graduating in history at Princeton University. His first visits to New York art galleries had a significant impact on his artistic development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.
After moving to New York in 1958, Stella reacted against the expressive use of painting by most of the painters of the abstract expressionist movement. Instead, he was attracted to the “flat” surfaces of Barnett Newman’s work and Jasper Johns’ “target” paintings. He began to produce works that emphasized the image as an object, rather than the image as a representation of something, whether it is something in the physical world, or something in the emotional world of the artist.
Over the course of his career, Stella continued to reinvent himself through consecutive bodies of work. He introduced more colors and reliefs into his paintings, while also moving towards “shaped canvas” painting. In 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella’s work, making him the youngest artist to receive one.
In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.
https://www.moma.org/artists/5640