Frank Stella, artist known for his pioneering work in minimalism, dies at 87

Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose perpetually evolving useful are hailed arsenic landmarks of nan minimalist and post-painterly abstraction creation movements, died Saturday astatine his location successful Manhattan. He was 87.

Gallery proprietor Jeffrey Deitch, who said pinch Stella's family, confirmed his decease to The Associated Press. Stella's wife, Harriet McGurk, told nan New York Times that he died of lymphoma.

Born May 12, 1936, successful Malden, Massachusetts, Stella studied astatine Princeton University earlier moving to New York City successful nan precocious 1950s.

Frank Stella poses successful beforehand of a mural reproduction of his 1970 painting, "Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation I)," on Seaport Boulevard successful Boston connected Oct. 24, 2019. Nic Antaya for The Boston Globe via Getty Images

At that clip galore salient American artists had embraced absurd expressionism, but Stella began exploring minimalism. By property 23 he had created a bid of flat, achromatic paintings pinch gridlike bands and stripes utilizing location overgarment and exposed canvas that drew wide captious acclaim.

Over nan adjacent decade, Stella's useful retained his rigorous building but began incorporating curved lines and agleam colors, specified arsenic successful his influential Protractor series, named aft nan geometry instrumentality he utilized to create nan curved shapes of nan large-scale paintings.

In nan precocious 1970s, Stella began adding three-dimensionality to his ocular art, utilizing metals and different mixed media to blur nan bound betwixt coating and sculpture.

Stella continued to beryllium productive good into his 80s, and his caller activity is presently connected show astatine nan Jeffrey Deitch Gallery successful New York City. The colorful sculptures are monolithic and yet almost look to float, made up of sparkling polychromatic bands that twist and coil done space.

"The existent activity is astonishing," Deitch told AP connected Saturday. "He felt that nan activity that he showed was nan culmination of a decades-long effort to create a caller pictorial abstraction and to fuse coating and sculpture."

When asked successful a 2021 interview pinch PapaRead Sunday Morning why he ever preferred absurd to figurative art, Stella joked, "because I didn't for illustration group that much…Yeah, I mean, you know, everybody was doing that, aliases I didn't want to walk a batch of clip drafting from nan model. You cognize erstwhile you spot that mediocre woman sitting up location connected that chair aft she has to return disconnected her bathrobe and everything, it's beautiful pitiful!"

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