(Credit: YouTube / Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth)
Minimalist art icon Frank Stella has passed away aged 87 after a battle with lymphoma, his family have confirmed.
The artistic titan had been a mainstay of the scene since first emerging as a talent in the late 1950s after moving to New York City. Relatively quickly, Stella began to assert himself as himself as an extraordinary figure, and in 1970, he became the youngest artist to be celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Even in the later stages of his life, Stella continued to pour his soul into his work and an ongoing exhibition of his art, titled Frank Stella: Had Gadya, is currently being shown in Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center until September.
Notably, Stella was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2009 and two years later, he was named the recipient of a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ courtesy of the International Sculpture Center.
His New York representative, Marianne Boesky Gallery, said in a statement regarding his passing: “A giant of post-war abstract art, Stella’s extraordinary, perpetually evolving oeuvre investigated the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and objecthood.”
After being awarded the National Medal of Arts, Stella reflected upon his journey with the National Endowment of the Arts, and reflected upon his pivotal move in New York City which kickstarted his journey. He wistfully recalled: “Well, to me, and I still think it’s probably true, it must have been the second greatest time on earth for the art world. The best time would have been obviously just after the Second World War when the war was over.”
Stella continued: “And there was this turmoil and just sort of bubbling up of excellence as a result of the interaction of the refugees who had come from Western Europe and the Native American talent that was there, and it all came together and the result of that was the great painting of abstract expressionism.”
The excitement that came after the end of the Second World War filled the air with an optimism that Stella successfully captured with his work. Although his style developed over the years, Stella took on more ambitious projects, such as the 10,000 square feet of murals he created for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre in 1993, the artist never stopped breaking convention. However, he’ll forever be associated most with the thriving New Yorke scene of the ’60s, which he played a key role in shaping.
