Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936. He studied at Princeton University, where he majored in history but also painted a great deal, influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. After graduating, Stella moved to New York in 1958.

Upon moving to New York Stella reacted against the expressive use of paint typical of the abstract expressionist movement. Instead he was drawn towards flatter surfaces seen for example in the work of Barnett Newman and the target paintings of Jasper Johns. Inspired by these, Stella began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something. This also marked his departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch.

Stella’s art was recognized for its innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959 he joined dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists and from 1960 he began to produce paintings in aluminium and copper paint, they were his first works which used irregular shaped canvases.

In 1961 Frank Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic.

During the 60’s Stella began to use a wider range of colours, typically arranged in straight or curved lines and by 1967 he began his ‘Protractor Series’ in which he painted coloured arcs within square borders, arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric colour. He named these paintings after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s.

Stella began printmaking in the mid-1960s. Originally working with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. he soon became very confident in the medium. Indeed his abstract prints in lithography, screenprinting, etching and offset lithography (a technique he introduced) have made a strong impact upon printmaking as an art.

By the 1970s Frank Stella introduced relief into his work which he named ‘maximalist’ painting for its sculptural qualities. This marked a large change in direction for the artist considering that the paintings which brought him recognition before 1960 were famous for their flatness. Stella also began to introduce elements of collage into his work. The 3 dimensional nature of these collages then inspired him to produce large, metal free-standing pieces, which, although they are painted upon, might well be considered sculpture. From there he began to use aluminum as the primary support for his paintings.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. These sculptural were derived from cones, pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative architectural elements using collages or maquettes that were enlarged and re-created with the aid of assistants, industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies. At this time Stella also began making free-standing sculpture for public spaces. His aluminium bandshell, for example, was built in downtown Miami in 1999 and in 2001 a monumental Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Stella’s work was included in several important exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas (1964–65) and Systemic Painting (1966). His art has been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He continues to live and work in New York.

Ahab's Leg (1989)

Silkscreen, lithograph, linoleum block wuth hand colouring and collage

190.0 x 139.0 cm

£ 22,000.00 GBP

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