Frank Stella (1936, Malden, USA). Lives and works in New York.

He studied painting at the Phillips Academy in Andover and at Princeton University, graduating in 1958 with a degree in history. After his graduation, Stella moved to New York and completed his renowned series of Black Paintings. Regarded as a precursor to Minimalism, these paintings garnered immediate recognition: four were included in New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Sixteen Americans 1959 exhibition, and Alfred Barr, the museum’s director, purchased one for the permanent collection shortly thereafter.

In 1960, Stella’s Aluminum Paintings, his earliest shaped canvases, were exhibited in his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, and 1961 brought his first solo exhibition abroad at Galerie Lawrence in Paris.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, his work was included in a number of significant exhibitions that proved to define the art of the time, including:

Geometric Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1962), Toward a New Abstraction (The Jewish Museum, New York 1963),
The Shaped Canvas (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964-65), Systemic Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966),
XXXII Venice Biennale (1966),
Dokumenta 4 (1968),
New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-70 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970),
Structure of Color (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971).

Stella continues to produce work in series, and in the 1960s he followed his Black and Aluminum canvases with his Copper Paintings, Concentric Squares, Mitered Mazes, Irregular Polygons, and Protractor Paintings. This time was also punctuated by his introduction into printmaking in the mid-60s, and his designs in 1967 for the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance performance choreographed by Merce Cunningham.In the 1970s, while finishing work on his Protractor and Saskatchewan series, Stella increasingly moved towards three-dimensionality with the high relief of his Polish Village series (named for the 17th-19th century wooden synagogues destroyed in Poland by the Nazis).

In 1970, at the age of 34, Stella became the youngest artist to receive a full-scale retrospective at MoMA.

In 1985 Stella began work on the The Wave series which in 1988 became known as the Moby Dick series, a set of 266 painted metal reliefs, collages, sculpture, prints and a block long mural (at least one unique work for each of the 138 chapters of Herman Melville’s novel).
In 1987 Stella was given an unprecedented second retrospective exhibition for a living artist at MoMA.In the 1990s Stella began work on his Imaginary Places series and started the Heinrich von Kleist series. One of his largest outdoor sculptures, completed and installed in 2001, is Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art’s Prince Frederick of Homburg which takes its title from one of Kleist’s Dramas.
Stella has worked on such projects as Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theater murals (1992-93), including the auditorium ceiling dome, proscenium arch, walls of lounges and lobbies on four levels of the theatre and the outside back wall of the fly tower. The paintings, covering 10,000 square feet are believed to comprise one of the largest mural installations of modern times.

As an architect he has completed proposals for museums in Gronigen, Dresden, and Buenos Aires. The Kleist series also gave title to The Broken Jug, a band shell composed of twisting aluminum that forms a proscenium which reaches a height of 37 feet and spans more than 50 feet.

In the spring of 2007 The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture and Frank Stella on the Roof.In his more recent work, the painted sand cast metal pieces of the Near East series and the twisted steel constructions of the Bamboo series and the Scarlatti K series, Stella continues to work freely in three dimensions.
Stella is the author of many essays and articles exploring painting and abstract art in particular. In 1983 he was named the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In 1986 those lectures, titled Working Space, were published in English, French and Japanese.

Stella is the recipient of many honors and awards:

1967 – first prize in Tokyo’s International Biennial Exhibition of Paintings;
1979 – Claude M. Fuess Distinguished Service Award from Phillips Academy; 1981 – both the Skowhegan Award for Painting and the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture;
1985 – Award of American Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts In 1989 – the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government;
1992 – the Barnard Medal of Distinction;
1998 – the Gold Medal for Graphic Art award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters;
2000 – he became the only American artist to have been given a solo show at London’s Royal Academy of which he is a member;
2001 – the Gold Medal of the National Arts Club in New York;
2009 – he was the recipient of the Julio Gonzalez Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Arts in Valencia, Spain;
2009 – he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.
Frank Stella lives and works in NY (USA).