Frank Stella
(1936 - 2024)

Frank Philip Stella was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City for much of his career before moving his studio to Rock Tavern, New York. Stella's work catalyzed the minimalist movement in the late 1950s. He moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where he created works which emphasized the picture-as-object. These were influenced by the abstract expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. He developed a reductionist approach to his art, saying he wanted to demonstrate that for him, every painting is "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more", and disavowed conceptions of art as a means of expressing emotion. He won notice in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Stella was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Stella

Manteneia II
1968
Acrylic on  canvas
152.4 x 609.6 cm
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, United States
https://chrysler.emuseum.com/objects/13814/manteneia-ii?ctx=37855a1be0b71cf291dec8ba1a8aedb175432e3e&idx=10

To create the works in his Protractor series, Frank Stella used the familiar draftsman’s tool to draw tightly interlocking color arcs on paper. When he transferred the drawings to his shaped, monumental canvases, he rejected the notion that paintings should be a rectangular window onto the world by creating uniform geometric patterns instead. Though the colorful bands lie flat on the surface of the canvas, they also create a lively optical dance due to their contrasting hues and bowed shapes. The names of the paintings in this series, including Manteneia II, are based on ancient, circular-planed towns in Asia Minor and on the Persian architecture seen by the artist when travelling in Iran.