The American painter and sculptor, Frank Stella, has been one of the most influential exponents of Minimalism, the movement in painting and sculpture which developed in the 1960s as a reaction to the so called excesses of Abstract Expressionism. Its exponents sought to emphasise the nature of the materials from which their painting or sculpture was created and to reduce colour, line and form to a series of simple geometric arrangements. Although Stella’s work from the 1970s onward shifted away from this earlier precision and clarity on flat surfaces, his early contributions to Minimalism were seminal, with patterns of angled, parallel stripes, often in arrangements of black and white, which emphasised the shape of the canvas. He later painted on irregularly shaped canvases. Born in 1936, he was still a young man in 1964 when he contributed to this portfolio. He was to become an active exponent of printmaking and produced many works with Ken Tyler of Gemini, one of the leading print studios in the USA from the 1960s onward.