Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American artist, the main representative of Minimalism, known for his paintings of a non-standard format and large-scale compositions that combine the features of painting, sculpture and architecture.

The creative career of the artist was incredibly successful. Immediately after graduation, Stella created a series of abstract works with geometric patterns, which were a huge success among fans of modern art. At the age of 25, he made a real revolution in painting, contrasting his emotionless works with the psychologically complex works of Abstract Expressionism; at the age of 34, he held a solo exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, becoming the youngest artist whose works were exhibited at this prestigious institution.

Throughout his career, Frank Stella continued to experiment, gradually expanding the range of his expressive means and increasing the scale of his creations. His first ascetic black-and-white works were replaced by colour paintings, the geometric pattern of which became more and more complicated and bizarre.

Over time, the artist began to include volumetric elements in his compositions, until he made a complete transition to volumetric creativity, making reliefs, sculptures and architectural projects in his recognizable style.

Frank Stella’s bold and even somewhat risky experiments made him a key figure in American Modernism, a source for the emergence of such art movements as Minimalism, Post-painterly abstraction and Colour field painting.

Key ideas:

– In the years of his studies, Frank Stella worked in the style of abstract expressionism. However, after he graduated from Princeton University, he immediately left this art movement.

– In his first minimalist works, Stella used only black household paint, alternating it with unpainted white spaces on canvas. This way of painting fully made it clear that fine art is not a three-dimensional space, as was commonly believed from the times of the Renaissance, but just a flat surface painted with one colour or another. Such a point of view made a real revolution in the visual arts and instantly made the author of this find famous.

– In his works, the artist tried to minimize the emotional side of the canvas and attachment to any topic. Stella’s works are lines, dots, space and colours, which are the same for everyone and have no subtext and secret meaning. They are a neutral visual object; as the artist himself said, his paintings are “a flat surface with paint on it – and nothing more”.

– In the following periods of his creative searches, Frank Stella often used optical illusions and volumetric elements in his paintings. He placed the geometric patterns on the canvas in such a way that it seemed to the viewer that some parts were moving forward, beyond the surface of the canvas, while others, on the contrary, noticeably deepened. Stella borrowed this technique from Caravaggio, an early 17th-century artist, who used similar effects in his painting.

– The artist is known for giving some of his paintings an unusual shape. Unlike the traditional rectangle of a square, some of Stella’s canvases have the shape of the letters L, T or U. In addition, in his later works, he used designs that strongly protruded forward, which made his work more voluminous and material. A vivid example is the series “Polish Village” created in the 1970s – the artist used wood, felt, paper and other materials.