Frank Stella was born May 12, 1938, in Malden Massachusetts. He attended the prestigious Philips Academy in Andover where he first learned about abstract modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. They would become great sources of inspiration for Stella. He subsequently went on to study history at Princeton University. During his time in Princeton he would frequently take trips to New York art galleries, being introduced to and influenced by among others the work of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Upon graduating, he moved to New York and started to pursue his artistic career. 

Already in his twenties, Stella was included in groundbreaking exhibitions like Sixteen Americans at MoMA in 1959. It was during this time that he painted the seminal Black Paintings, credited by some of reinventing modernism and giving birth to the new minimalist movement. Many consider these paintings as the highlight of his long career.

Frank Stellas formalist concerns led to boundary pushing and reinvention of his work for decades. His intense early exploration of color, line and texture underlined the ambition to make the pictorial surface to reach beyond the flat canvas to the realm of volume, space and light. Stella’s collaboration with master printer Ken Tyler led to the breakthrough technique referred to today as offset lithography. Stella is recognised as being as important to the art of fine printmaking as to painting. 

Loosening the boundaries of the pictorial surface by introducing relief into his art, Stella eventually moved into three-dimensional sculpture and architecture, and this became his main concern for the rest of his career.

Stella is arguably one of the most important artistic figure of postwar art history. During his lifetime, he exhibited in major international institutions and produced a series of stunning public commissions. In 2016, The Whitney Museum of American Art inaugurated its new downtown New York building with a major retrospective of Stellas work. Frank Stella continued to live and work in New York until his passing in 2024.