In Focus: Frank Stella

One of the most celebrated and innovative American artists of our time, Frank Stella is renowned for his early minimalist aesthetic and later expressive abstraction.

His investigations into form and materials have led him to continually explore the parameters of two– and three–dimensional space. In 1967 Stella began a thirty–year creative collaboration with master printer Ken Tyler and his Los Angeles workshop. Stella and Tyler inspired and challenged each other to move in exciting new artistic directions. The Museum was recently gifted three exceptional prints that developed out of this historic partnership. Based on Stella’s paintings from the Notched-V series, they reflect the artist’s signature geometric style of the 1960s, during which he eschewed illusionistic space, choosing instead large–scale, shaped canvases that tightly frame the composition. The prints are both optical and tactile: The ink rises from the paper and the slightly rough lines reveal the artist’s hand.