Frank Stella (Malden, Massachusetts, 1936 – Manhattan, New York, 2024) spent six decades pursuing a single, continually escalating question: how literal pictorial space could become before painting stopped being painting and turned into an object, then a relief, then a freestanding structure occupying the room. That question took him from the austere, monochrome canvases that helped define Minimalism to some of the most maximalist, three-dimensional constructions in postwar American art.

Stella studied painting at Phillips Academy under Patrick Morgan, then majored in history at Princeton, where he continued to paint under Stephen Greene and came under the influence of the art historian William Seitz. After graduating in 1958, he moved to New York and began the Black Paintings (1958–59), austere compositions of black enamel bisected by thin pinstripes of bare canvas that established his reputation when they appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark 1959–60 exhibition Sixteen Americans. He followed them with the Aluminum Paintings (1960) and Copper Paintings (1960–61), extending his exploration of the shaped canvas and cementing his standing as a pioneer of Minimalism.