Artist Frank Stella died Saturday, May 4 of lymphoma at his home in NYC where he lived and worked his entire career.
Stella was a pioneer of the early 60s when painters and sculptors challenged the idea of what art could be. He arrived on the NY art scene with Pop artists of his generation, but was never considered Pop. I always loved the precision and color palette of his early work, but I’ll admit that I never really “got” him until his 2015 Whitney retrospective.
I lived and worked in my own studio just a block away at the time. I spent a while walking through the galleries looking at and photographing the as you can see in these photos here. Stella worked form, color space and materials like no other. He took the early ideas of his work and later exploded them off the walls into the viewers space.
3D felt like 4D. Spin through these images. At the time of the show, which he was HEAVILY involved in editing and installing, he was 76. He’s still playing, albeit on a monumental scale with lots of help from assistants, no doubt, but the experimentation and curiosity and invention was evident, even in a museum setting. It felt like he was working out new ideas with every piece.
One of the underrated greats is gone. But he left great work for us to enjoy and study.
Frank Stella was 87.
All photographs, Trey Speegle shot at the Whitney Museum, NYC.