Frank Stella, b. 1936

Frank Stella first came into prominence in 1959, when his spare, black-and-white canvases were featured in a seminal show at the Museum of Modern Art, and he emerged in the 1960s as one of the leading figures of American Abstraction.

In marked contrast to the paradigm of painting as a magic window, Stella advanced a more literal, concrete conception of the painted surface as a pattern bounded by edges. His shaped canvases of concentric black-and-white bands set the stage for the Minimalist movement, but Stella began in the later 1960s to integrate color into his increasingly monumental compositions. One of a series of paintings that explored relationships of color, form and pattern, Flin Flon VIII’s petal-like geometric shapes– made of overlapping protractor outlines– seem to project and recede in a dizzying optical dance.