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Renowned minimalist painter Frank Stella died of lymphoma on Saturday at his home in Manhattan, New York. The artist was 87 years old.
Stella's representative, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, confirmed this news through NPR.
“Marianne Boesky began representing Stella in 2014, and the gallery is deeply grateful for her decade-long collaboration with the artist and his studio,” Boesky said in a statement shared with NPR. She said: “It has been a great honor to work with Frank over the past 10 years. His incredible legacy will be greatly missed.”
One of the most influential American artists of her time, Stella was a pioneer of the minimalist movement in the early 1960s. During that period, painters and sculptors challenged the idea that art should be representative and used the medium as a message.
Instead of representing a three-dimensional world through canvas, some of Stella's early works reflected his desire to create an immediate visual impact on the viewer. A series titled black picture The use of parallel black stripes created the perception that the painting was a two-dimensional surface. As Stella once said aphoristically, “What you see is what you see.”
2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. digital image
“It was about being able to create an abstraction based on nothing else than the gesture of making itself, which is the gesture of making the painting.” Stella Terry Gross clear air Interview in 2000.
Frank Stella was born into a middle-class Italian-American family. His father was an obstetrician who painted homes during the Great Depression, and his mother was a homemaker and artist. Young Stella grew up surrounded by paint. He was among his mother's artwork and helped his father whenever he repainted his house. “I’ve always loved paint,” he told Gross. “Its physical properties.”
He began exploring paint more professionally while in high school in Massachusetts under the tutelage of abstract painter Patrick Morgan. While studying history as an undergraduate at Princeton, Stella continued to take art classes. Through Ivy League connections, Stella was introduced to the art world of New York City, which began to shape his early artistic vision as he encountered artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, among his most admired influences.
“More than anything, I wanted to make art that was as good as what great artists make. I wanted to make art that one day – although I didn’t expect it to happen right away – would be as good as it is now. [Willem] De Kooning or Kline [Barnett] Newman or Pollock [Mark] Roscoe. “They were my heroes and I wanted to make art as good as them.” clear air.
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Stella made her debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when she was only 23 years old. And right after his series ended black Figure, He started in 1958 Stella made two more series. aluminum painting (1960) and copper painting (1960-61), he was committed to the idea that art lies in the medium and, as he put it, in the medium. tutelar It's expected to be “fairly simple” in 2015.
In 1970, at age 33, Stella became the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His exhibition covered ten years of his drawings and paintings and emphasized originality in simplicity.
In the 1990s, Stella's work evolved from canvas to colorful geometric compositions and sculptures. He began using computer technology and architectural renderings to incorporate digital images into his work. His Moby Dick The series of paintings, lithographs and sculptures take their titles from chapters in Herman Melville's classic novel. According to the Princeton University Art Museum, the series is Stella's “most ambitious artistic effort… [that] “It is a work that blurs the boundaries between printmaking, painting, and sculpture.”
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An honest and somewhat blunt artist, Stella never cared what others thought about her or her art. But his 60-year career inspired generations of artists, including painter Julie Mehretu. “When I really started to understand and follow his work, there was a certain kind of creativity and playfulness and extreme rigor that he continued to develop,” she said in a 2015 NPR interview.
Stella's numerous awards and recognitions include the 2009 National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor for artistic excellence, and the International Sculpture Center's 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture.