1936 Malden
- lebt und arbeitet in New York

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936. After attending the Phillips Academy in Andover he studied in Princeton between 1954 and 1958. Beside his main subject history, he attended a painter's class at the university. Afterwards Stella rented a studio in New York, where he was impressed by abstract Expressionism and especially Jasper Johns' works. Soon afterwards the first paintings of the ‚Black paintings' series came into existence. In 1959 Stella was able to show four of these huge canvases at the Museum of Modern Arts' exhibition ‚Sixteen Americans' and became promptly known. Experiments with symmetric patterns in different series became his art's trademark. In 1970 a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was shown et al. at the Hayward Gallery in London and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, took stock of his productivity. Since the 1970s Stella's works also pushed into the room. In 1983 Stella was appointed Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at the Harvard university in Cambridge. Since 1990 the artist also worked with architecture projects and designed plans for the New Museum in Groningen. In 1991 he began with plans for an art hall in Dresden.
Stella's works take an exceptional position in American Pop Art and echo at the same time Minimal Art and abstract Expressionism. ‚What you see is what you see'. This seemingly trivial quote of the artist summarises his work's core statement. The whole idea of the image must be recognisable and experienceable without previous knowledge. The radicality of Stella's painting found its expression in the picture format of ‚Shaped canvases' developed by Stella. The structure of the colour courses call for the format's outlines. In merging content and form, Stella negates vividly the illustratability of art.

Stella, Frank

Stella, Frank

Stella, Frank

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