One of the most influential American artists of the 20th century, Frank Stella has rigorously explored the formal imperatives of art, including line, color, and form. Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936, and he attended the Phillips Academy preparatory school before going on to study history at Princeton University in New Jersey. While enrolled at Princeton, Stella frequented galleries and museums in New York, which inspired him to pursue art as a career.

In 1958, after graduation, Stella moved to New York, and within a year his work was gaining critical recognition and attention. In 1959, he was included in the important Sixteen Americansexhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and he joined the influential Leo Castelli Gallery. Completed between 1958 and 1960, Stella’s seminal “Black Paintings” series represented a notable departure from the emotive, often spontaneous, gestural strokes of the trending Abstract Expressionist style of the time. These works, achieved by the artist’s mechanical and repetitive systems of symmetrical patterns, comprised straightforward and severe black stripes on irregularly shaped canvases. Straddling the line between modernism and the emergent Minimalist movement, while experimenting with both real and perceived space,this seminal body of work created a pivotal moment in history of modern art. By the late 1960s Stella also incorporated printmaking into his practice, beginning a long collaboration with preeminent printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L.