Top image: Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Next week the Whitney Museum of American Art will open an epic, sixty-year retrospective of American artist, Frank Stella.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective culminates paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings – around 100 varying pieces – that follow the perpetual evolution of his artistic execution, style and events of creative sublimation.

Stella’s style was decisively opposed to the flamboyant, representational methods of Abstract Expressionist painters during the post-War period. Emotional extremities – angst, trauma, depression – that fuelled the conceptual workings from minds like Pollock, Rothko, and Willem de Kooning were cast aside by Stella, preferring a simplistic form (of linearity) grounded in the technicalities of art-making. Populist art-ideals during this time were therefore diametrically opposed.

This diametric opposition to populist ideals had a profound effect on the art world: the series Black Paintings catalysed Minimalism into action through its technical focus on key elements of constructing art. A form of regulation – and a notion that diluted the uncontrollable, emotional ferocity of Abstract Expressionism.

“It’s not merely the length of his career, it is the intensity of his work and his ability to reinvent himself as an artist over and over again over six decade that make his contributions so important.” Adam D. Weinberg said, who is the Alice Pratt Brown Director of Whitney Museum of American Art. “He is a singular, American master.”

The exhibition runs from Oct 30, 2015 – Feb 7, 2016. Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014.