The American painter and sculptor, Frank Stella,was 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 emphasize 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 which emphasised the shape of the canvas, which was sometimes irregular.

In 1967 he met Ken Tyler of Gemini - one of the leading print studios in the USA from the 1960s onward. It was with Tyler that he began printmaking and his first prints were Star of Persia Iand Star of Persia II (designs from the Notched V series of 1964-65) and the entire edition sold by the end of the year.