North-American Frank Stella, master of minimalism, has died | Painting

When an artist like Frank Stella dies, whoever writes the obituaries in the newspapers, or who is mentioned in them, never fails to list the movements he was part of, the ones he rejected and, above all, those that, without him, would not have been born or would, at least, be least, something else.

It is therefore not unusual that, as in the case of the diary The New York Timesreferences to his departure from the abstract expressionism so dominant in the environment in which he became a painter and sculptor and to his dive into “minimalism cool” and in a seemingly unlimited exploration of color, a combination that gave rise to works that have become familiar in the visual heritage, even if those who look at them cannot immediately identify their author.

Frank Stella (1936-2024) died this Saturday, aged 87, at his home in Manhattan. The news was forwarded to the Associated Press (AP) news agency by gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch and confirmed to the Teams by the artist’s wife, Harriet McGurk, who also said that Stella had died of lymphoma.

Born in Massachusetts, later a student at Princeton University, Frank Stella moved to New York in the late 1950s and found a city on the rise, with many of its most acclaimed artists dedicating themselves, with resurgence and success, to the abstract expressionism.

The painter, then 23 years old, chose to explore minimalism and the recipe for color and restraint in his Black Paintings – paintings in which precisely outlined black stripes appear separated by thin lines of blank canvas, creating compositions that deceive, challenge and attract – caught the attention of critics and created the ideal conditions for him to be considered one of the most influential names of the following decade , having in its circle artists such as Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, and being a reference for architects such as Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, recalls the British newspaper The Guardianin a 2015 article in which he anticipates Stella’s third retrospective in New York, at the Whitney Museum, with a conversation and a visit to the artist’s very messy but fruitful studio in Greenwich Village.

“What you see is what you see”said Frank Stella, referring to these first Black Paintings that enchanted the New York milieu and his work in general, a phrase that ended up sticking to the minimalist movement, as a kind of unofficial motto. “It was supposed to be quite simple”, he would add, highlighting the contrast between what he did – for him a painting was just “a flat surface covered in paint, nothing more” – and the emotional, dramatic charge of post-World War II abstract expressionism, which has among its greatest exponents the engaging and demanding Mark Rothko, another of the great explorers of color.

In the 60s, Frank Stella did not abandon the rigor of straight lines, but also began to dedicate himself to curves, not even respecting the traditional shapes of the canvas. The use of black was then superimposed by the bright colors that, for example, take over his series Protactorwith large-scale works such as Hagamatana IIfrom 1967 (305.4 x 458 x 7.5 cm), a painting that belongs to the Berardo collection and is now part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Centro Cultural de Belém (MAC/CCB), in Lisbon.

Constantly evolving, averse to any impulse to “interpretation” of his paintings and the repetition of formulas, the artist would introduce the three-dimensional element into his works in the following decade, using materials of a different nature. Painting and sculpture combined to create new territories of expression, an experience, in fact, common to other artists.

It was precisely this transgression of borders that US President Barack Obama highlighted when he awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 2009, praising his immense “sophisticated visual experiments”.

It is this side of an indefatigable experimenter that is now highlighted when it comes to reviewing his career spanning more than 65 years. “Always looking for a new language”, writes the specialized website Artnet, a reference in the art market, Stella “infuriated some sectors of the art world”, but never let that deter him from continuing to do something different, new.