Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

His father, Frank Sr., was a gynecologist, and his mother Constance (née Santonelli) was a housewife and artist[2] who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.

At this time Stella was particularly affected by the work of the artist Josef Albers, a Bauhaus color theorist, and Hans Hofmann, an influential proto-Abstract Expressionist.

[8] As of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his upstate studio at Rock Tavern, New York, in the Hudson River Valley.

[3] The critic and essayist Megan O'Grady visited the studio in 2019, and writing for the New York Times Style Magazine, described it as a "hangar-like structure", its entrance marked by a piece of wood spray-painted with the name "Stella".

She called the interior a "vast space more easily traversed by golf cart than on foot", divided into separate rooms for fabrication and display, with a curtain hanging in the rear behind which he kept his spray-painter, his industrial sander, and new works being assembled.

[10] These paintings, his response to the Abstract Expressionist movement that grew in the years following World War II, were devoid of color and meant to lack any visual stimulation.

[14] Stella's work was a catalyst for the minimalist movement in the late 1950s; he stressed the properties of the materials he used in his paintings, disavowing any conception of art as a means of expressing emotion.

Stella shared studio space with Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, both of whom had attended Phillips Academy, and scrounged a living by renting cold-water flats and painting houses.

In a 1964 radio broadcast of a discussion of contemporary art with fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin,[17] he summarized his concerns as a painter with the words, "My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.

[21] In 1961, Stella followed Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic,[22] to Pamplona, Spain, where she had gone on a Fulbright fellowship; they married in London that November.

His painting, Protractor Variation I (1969), now at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, epitomizes his move away from ascetic, monochrome compositions to the vibrant colors and formal complexity of his output after the late 1960s.

[30] In the following decade, as he began to adopt more unusual color schemes and shapes,[31] Stella brought to his artistic productions the element of relief, which he called "maximalist" painting because it had sculptural attributes.

[2] In this period of his career, as the relief of his paintings became increasingly higher with more undercutting, the process eventually resulted in fully three-dimensional sculptural forms that he derived from decorative architectural elements, and incorporating French curves, pillars, waves, and cones.

To generate these works, he made collages or scale models that were subsequently enlarged to the original's specifications by his assistants, along with the use of digital technology and industrial metal cutters.

[24] In 1993, he designed and executed for Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre a 10,000-square-foot mural installation which covers the ceiling of the dome, the proscenium arch and the exterior rear wall of the building.

[37][38] A monumental sculpture of his, titled Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X, was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[39][40] From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored.

[6] The series title refers to the music of the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, known for his short but exuberant Baroque period harpsichord sonatas (he wrote more than 500 of them), and to Ralph Kirkpatrick, the American musicologist and harpsichordist, who brought Scarlatti's work to the attention of the listening public, and in 1953 produced the authoritative scholarly catalogue of the sonatas.

[45] Ron Labaco, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, showed Stella's work in an exhibition featuring computer-enabled pieces, Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital (2013-14).

[46] The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits.

[46] His Jasper's Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed out of six small geometric grids that rest on an aluminum base, was installed at 7 World Trade Center in 2021.

[6] In late 2022, Stella launched his first NFT (non-fungible token) for his Geometries project in collaboration with the Artists Rights Society (ARS).

[48] Katarina Feder, director of business development at ARS, said, "We sold out all 2,100 tokens, and, importantly, brought in resale royalties for secondary sales, something that Frank has been championing for decades.

The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work.

The paintings were inspired by photographs and drawings he saw of wooden synagogues that the Nazis had burned down in eastern Poland during World War II.

[54] Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting.

[62] Viewing some of Stella's large scale works at a 1982 exhibition in the Addison Gallery at the Phillips Academy, critic Kenneth Baker voiced a dissenting opinion.

Saltz advised them to think literally, and in terms of the space the works occupy and the nature of their surfaces, seeing color as an element of their structures.

He described Stella as being one of "the first to deal as directly as possible with the perception of material, form, and color", "the first hard-core Minimalist painter", and "a forerunner to the Postminimalism that defined the late 1960s and 1970s".

The director of the Tournament of Champions, John Nimick, said, "Frank was a patron saint of our sport and various efforts to promote squash in New York City for forty years.