Frank Stella

SPACE

Frank Stella breaks the boundaries of space and room. He generates works in which shape and color create new dimensions. Gallery Terminus is proud to personally welcome Frank Stella, one of the most significant representatives of contemporary American art, to his opening exhibition “Space” on October 23, 2007.

Born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts to an affluent family, Stella first began painting while in prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover. His father, a gynaecologist, encouraged him to go to a top Ivy League school, and when the time came to decide, he chose Princeton for its proximity to the New York art scene.

Stella’s charmed career in the arts began in 1958 when, fresh out of Princeton University, he came to New York and created a studio in the Lower East Side. He began using common house paint to create symmetrical black stripes on canvas. These early works, known as the “Black Paintings”, were chosen by the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1959 to be included to their show entitled Sixteen Americans. Their debut is credited with the launch of the minimalist movement of the 1960s.

Stella quickly became a regular in the N.Y. art scene. He befriended painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and architects Richard Meier and Philip Johnson, and married his first wife, art critic Barbara Rose. In 1959, Leo Castelli included Stella, then only 23, among the breakthrough artists his gallery represented. Though he continued to refine his signature cool, removed approach into the 60s, his paintings evolved to include bright colors and geometrically and curvilinear-shaped canvases.

In contrast to their minimalist appearance, the titles of Stella’s works became increasingly exotic and evocative. Names like Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II (1969), Firuzabad III (1970), and Botafogo (1975) suggest multiple levels of depth and meaning.

Stella became the one of the few artists to be featured in two major retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art: one in 1970 and one in 1987. Throughout the 70s and the 80s, he continued to reinvent himself, making a wild departure from his Minimalist roots to explore sculptural forms using explosive colors.

Of late, Stella’s work has remained within the three-dimensional realm; his latest sculptures (which he refers to by saying, “A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere”) abandon the brazen color, but still maintain an explosive quality in their scale and form. This development is obvious in the recent works by Stella to be seen at Gallery Terminus.

In the summer of 2001, The Prince of Homburg, a massive 20.000 pound outdoor sculpture, mostly metal, was inaugurated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Frank Stella’s works are in the most important international collections (e.g., Salomon R. Guggenheim collection and the Museum of Modern Art New York). His work was shown in several retrospectives in the United States, Europe as well as Japan.

Stella lives and works in New York.