An artist from America known for their abstract work, Frank Stella, died on Saturday at 87. He took his last breath at his home situated in Manhattan. According to his wife, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, the cause of his death was lymphoma.
Stella was born in 1936 and was a native of Massachusetts. I attended Phillips Academy Andover and learned painting under the mentorship of Patrick Morgan. Before moving to New York City in the late 1950s, he studied history and painting under Stephen Greene and William Seitz at Princeton.
He achieved fame with his monochromatic “Black Paintings,” shown at the Museum of Modern Art when Stella was just 22, and he became a famous contributor to the postwar abstract movement. While making Black Painting, Stella used house paint and a broad brush to create black stripes, leaving evenly spaced thin lines of exposed canvas between them.
Stella was prolific for six decades, evolving his medium with mixed media elements and non-conventional geometric canvases to blur the boundary between painting and sculpture.
Stella acclaimed works include the ‘Protractor Series’ of curved lines and bright colours, created in the late 1960s and early 70s, as well as the neon-speckled “Moby Dick” inspired sculptures from the 80s and 90s.
Stella continues to create art well into his ninth decade, with some of his new sculptures being displayed at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City.
One of Stella’s final pieces is still on display in Florida at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.