Frank Stella Art for Sale: Prints & Originals

Frank
Stella

American artist Frank Stella is best-known for his Minimalist, post-painterly abstract works, favouring simplicity over the overflowing compositions of his Abstract-Expressionist contemporaries. If you’re looking for original Frank Stella prints and editions for sale or would like to sell, request a complimentary valuation and browse our network’s most in-demand works.

Biography

Known for his minimalist geometric abstraction, Frank Stella’s belief that “What you see is what you see,” when it comes to his work is all too true. The artist rebelled against the passionate brushstrokes and highly psychological aesthetic of many Abstract Expressionists in favour of simple compositions with exuberant colour and precise geometry.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936, Frank Stella received a privileged education at the Phillips Academy. Here, he first encountered the abstract oeuvres of Josef Albers and Hans Hoffman, which served as his primary creative inspiration. After graduating from Princeton University, Stella settled in New York City in 1958 and began his artistic career in 1959, with a series of paintings composed of only black paint on unprimed canvas. These works immediately received positive recognition within the New York art scene and, a year later, four paintings from this body of work were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Sixteen Americans. The show propelled Stella towards success, establishing him as a promising artist and a pioneer of the Minimalist style. Stella was not yet 25 years old. Following on from this success, Stella had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery.

Since those early black canvases, Stella’s critical recognition and popularity have never waned. Transitioning from his early canvases as his career progressed, Stella introduced a lot of colour into his work, as well as metallic-coloured paints, and canvases of irregular shapes, as seen in his Aluminum and Copper series from the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1960s, however, Stella had adopted an even brighter, sometimes fluorescent, colour palette for his Protractor series (one of his most famous collections of work), as well as a bold use of full and half circles and other geometric shapes.

In 1970, Stella became the youngest artist ever to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which pays testament to his reputation as an artist, even at this early stage. Throughout the 1980s, the artist continued his work by producing approximately 260 works based on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. These pieces ranged from large-scale sculptural works to mixed-media paintings and prints and have remained some of his best-loved works to date.

In the 1990s, Stella started creating more public artworks, including a large-scale mural for the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, and the piece Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X (1998-2001), which stands in front of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Some of his subsequent solo exhibitions include Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, at the Met Museum in New York in 2007, Inflated Star and Wood Star, at the Royal Academy in London in 2015, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016 and Frank Stella: Recent Work, showing his sculptural pieces at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York in 2019. Stella’s Minimalist and post-painterly style is cited as an inspiration for generations of important artists and architects such as Sol Lewitt, Carl Andre, and Frank Gehry. He remains one of the most influential artists working today.

As well as Josef Albers and Hans Hoffman, who inspired a very young Stella while at the Phillips Academy, Stella was fascinated with artists that broke free of the common artistic trends of the time. He decidedly rejected the then-dominant Abstract Expressionist movement, instead, paying attention to painters such as Barnett Newman and Jasper Johns, who focused primarily on colour and flat surfaces and presented the picture as an object. When he moved to New York after attending Princeton University, he was also influenced by the freedom of the work of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. This enthusiasm for colour, for breaking free from the norm, and for creating bold statement pieces, has followed Stella’s work ever since.
Stella’s interest in art began with his mother, who was a housewife and artist who spent some time at fashion school and had a love of landscape paintings. Stella married art historian Barbara Rose in 1961 and had two children, Rachel and Michael. In 1978, after his marriage ended in 1969, Stella married paediatrician Harriet McGurk.
In the 1970s, Stella moved to NoHo in Manhattan, and then moved again to Greenwich Village in 2015. His studio still resides in Rock Tavern.
In more recent years, Stella has established himself as a strong advocate for tightening copyright protection for artists. In 2008, Stella contributed to an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper to criticise the U.S. Orphan Works law, which proposed to remove the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work cannot be found. A year later, Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama, and in 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture.

Achieving this impressive result at Sotheby's in May 2024, just a week after the artist’s death, Ifafa I (1964) represents one of the most recent sales on this list, underscoring the continued strength of Stella's market. This mixed media work, which incorporates polymer emulsion and metallic powder, exemplifies Stella's evolving approach to form and materiality during this pivotal period of artistic exploration. The work's title references a river in South Africa, in line with Stella's practice of giving his abstract works geographically or historically significant names. At nearly two metres wide, the ambitious scale, distinctive tesselating V-shaped design, and subtle tonal variation demonstrate Stella's growing interest in the interplay between geometric shapes and spatial perception. Critics have noted how pieces from this period mark Stella's transition from pure Minimalism toward the more complex, three-dimensional works that would define his later career.