Frank Stella, artist known for blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, dies at 87

Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose constantly evolving works served as touchstones of the minimalist and post-painting abstraction art movements, has died

NEW YORK — Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose ever-evolving works are hailed as landmarks of the minimalist and post-painting abstraction art movements, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87 years old.

Gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who spoke with Stella’s family, confirmed her death to the Associated Press. Stella’s wife, Harriet McGurk, told the New York Times that he died of lymphoma.

Born May 12, 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella studied at Princeton University before moving to New York in the late 1950s.

By that time, many prominent American artists had embraced abstract expressionism, but Stella began to explore minimalism. At age 23, he created a series of flat, black paintings with grid-like bands and stripes, using house paint and exposed canvas, that drew widespread critical acclaim.

Over the next decade, Stella’s works maintained their rigorous structure but began to incorporate curved lines and bright colors, as in his influential Protractor series, named after the geometric tool he used to create the curved forms of large-scale paintings. .

In the late 1970s, Stella began adding three-dimensionality to her visual art, using metals and other mixed media to blur the lines between painting and sculpture.

Stella continued to be productive well into her 80s, and her new work is currently on display at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York. The colorful sculptures are enormous and yet they almost appear to float, composed of bright polychromatic bands that twist and coil in space.

“The current work is amazing,” Deitch told the AP on Saturday. “He felt that the work he showed was the culmination of a decades-long effort to create a new pictorial space and fuse painting and sculpture.”