Frank Stella, the painter, sculptor and printmaker whose ever-evolving work is hailed as a landmark in the minimalist and pictorial abstract art movements, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87 years old.
Gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who spoke with Stella’s family, confirmed her death to The Associated Press. Stella’s wife, Harriet McGuirk, told the New York Times that Stella died of lymphoma.
Born May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella attended Princeton University and moved to New York City in the late 1950s.
While many prominent American artists at the time embraced Abstract Expressionism, Stella began exploring minimalism. By the age of 23, he had created a series of flat, black paintings with checkered bands and stripes using house paint and exposed canvas, which garnered widespread critical acclaim.
Over the next decade, Stella’s work maintained its rigid structure, but like her influential Protractor series, named for the geometric tools she used to create the curved shapes of her large paintings. Now incorporating curves and bright colors.
In the late 1970s, Stella began adding three-dimensionality to her visual art, using metal and other mixed media to blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Stella remains active well into his 80s, and his new work is currently on display at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. The colorful sculptures are huge yet almost floating, made up of glowing multicolored bands that twist and intertwine through space.
“The job we have right now is amazing,” Deitch said Saturday. “He felt that the work he exhibited was the culmination of decades of effort to create new pictorial spaces and to fuse painting and sculpture.”
