How did Frank Stella Die? An Renowned American Painter is No More

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Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose ever-changing works are regarded as monuments of the minimalist and post-painterly abstraction art movements, died Saturday at home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Frank Stella
npr.org

How did Frank Stella Die?

The Associated Press reported that gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch confirmed Stella’s death after speaking with her relatives. Stella’s widow, Harriet McGurk, told the New York Times that he died from cancer. Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts. She attended Princeton University before coming to New York City in the late 1950s. Many well-known American artists had adopted abstract expressionism at the time, but Stella began to investigate minimalism. By age 23, he had made a series of flat, black paintings with gridlike bands and stripes on exposed canvas, which received widespread critical recognition.

Frank Stella, an Epic Painter:

Over the next decade, Stella’s works maintained their rigid structure while introducing curved lines and brilliant colors, as seen in his renowned Protractor series, named after the geometry tool he used to construct the curved shapes of large-scale paintings. Stella began using three-dimensional elements in his visual art in the late 1970s, blending painting and sculpture with metals and other mixed media.

Stella remained active well into his 80s, and his last work is now on show at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. The bright sculptures are large but almost appear to float, composed of shimmering polychromatic bands that twist and coil through space. “The current work is astonishing,” Deitch told the Associated Press on Saturday. “He felt that the work he showed was the conclusion of a decades-long effort to create an entirely novel pictorial space and merge painting and sculpture.”

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