BiographyFrank Stella was a pioneering American minimalist and abstract painter who rose to prominence in the late 1950s with his Black Paintings, which rejected the expressive gestures of Abstract Expressionism in favor of precise geometric stripes. He expanded his practice over decades into shaped canvases, reliefs, and large-scale public sculptures that blended painting and three-dimensional form. His declaration "What you see is what you see" became a defining statement of Minimalism.
