Renowned geometric artist Frank Stella passes away at the age of 87

Renowned geometric artist Frank Stella passes away at the age of 87
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Frank Stella, a multi-talented artist whose ever-changing creations are recognized as seminal pieces of minimalist and post-painterly abstract art, passed away on Saturday at his Manhattan residence. He was eighty-seven.

After speaking with Stella’s family, gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch confirmed his passing to The Associated Press. According to Stella McGurk’s wife, Harriet McGurk, he passed away from lymphoma.

Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936. She attended Princeton University and later moved to New York City in the late 1950s.

While many well-known American artists at the time were drawn to abstract expressionism, Stella started experimenting with minimalism. At the age of 23, he used house paint and exposed canvas to produce a series of flat, black paintings with gridlike bands and stripes that received widespread critical acclaim.

Stella’s works over the following ten years kept their strict compositions but started to use bright colors and curved lines, as seen in his well-known Protractor series, which took its name from the geometry tool he used to draw the curved shapes in large-scale paintings.

Stella started incorporating three dimensions into his artwork in the late 1970s. He did this by blending metals and other mixed media into his paintings and sculptures.

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Even into his 80s, Stella was still producing art, and his most recent creations can be seen at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. The sculptures are made of shining polychromatic bands that twist and coil through space, giving them massive and yet almost float-like appearance.

“The work being done right now is incredible,” Deitch told AP on Saturday. “He believed that the work he displayed was the result of years of work to combine painting and sculpture and to establish a new pictorial space.”

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