Frank Stella

One of the twentieth century's most innovative artists, Frank Stella is an American artist who was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936. After graduating from Princeton University with a bachelor of arts degree in history in 1958, he moved to New York city, where he still lives and works.

The most extraordinary aspect of Stella's enduring career has been his remarkable ability to reinvent himself and his art. Since the early 1960s, he has conceived his work in series. He gained early, immediate recognition with his "Black Paintings" in which parallel patterns in black house paint were separated by pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Over the following decades Stella shifted to a more exuberant use of color, shapes and curving forms, pioneering new approaches to narrative and abstraction with innovative paintings, prints, sculptures, and architectural installations. He calls his artistic development an evolution from Minimalism to Maximalism.

Stella has exhibited his work internationally since 1959 and has been the subject of several retrospectives. Stella's work in held in major museum collections worldwide including, Tate, London; Folkwang Museum, Essen; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Kunstmuseum Basel; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hishhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan.