American painter Frank Stella has been accorded the Julio González Prize recognizing his work in the arts and his contributions to Modern art. This is the ninth time that the award has been given out and previous winners have been: Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Eduardo Chillida, Anish Kapoor, Markus Lüpertz, Robert Rauschenberg, Anthony Caro, Pierre Soulages and Miquel Navarro.

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton University, where he painted, influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and majored in history. Early visits to New York art galleries would prove to be an influence upon his artistic development. Stella moved to New York in 1958 after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters who still works today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career.

Stella’s work was included in several important exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966). His art has been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Among the many honors he has received was an invitation from Harvard University to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984. Calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting, these six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.

Stella continues to live and work in New York. He also remains active in protecting the rights for his fellow artists. On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella is a member artist of the Artists Rights Society) published an Op-Ed for the The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located."


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