Stella, Frank Philip (1936- )

US painter. He was a leading figure in minimalism and a pioneer of the severe, hard-edged geometric trend in abstract art that followed abstract expressionism. From around 1960 he experimented with shaped canvases.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, he studied at Princeton University, New Jersey. In the late 1950s he abandoned abstract expressionism and in 1960 came to prominence when he exhibited large-scale paintings consisting of thin regular white stripes on black. He worked in metallic paint 1960-62, again using thin stripes which repeated the non-rectangular shape of the support. Later paintings by Stella employ a wider range of colour, the choice of which emphasizes the flatness of the painting, which is then contradicted by the use of overlapping shapes.

Stella has also worked in sculpture, for example in the abstract Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X (2001) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.