NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's Prints and Multiples Department announced a sale dedicated to the printing practice of twentieth century icon, Frank Stella, consigned by the artist's estate. The sale comprises 65 lots ranging in scale, technique, and formal composition, and acts as a survey of his most inventive and innovative works in the medium. Estimates range from $3,000 to $80,000. The online auction is open from September 24 - October 22, with highlights on view at Christie's Rockefeller Center from September 25 – 30 and October 16 – 20.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Stella's relationship with printmaking became inseparable from his identity as an artist. As he put it late in his career, “the prints are in all of my work.” This was despite the fact that he began as a reluctant convert: printmaking, he once said, was a chore “not very different from walking the dogs.” That changed in 1967, when he began his thirty-four-year partnership with master printer Ken Tyler.

Stella's first steps in the medium involved mastering traditional techniques. Over time, however, the experiments grew more audacious, until the printshop resembled nothing so much as a laboratory. Prints were pulled from carved plywood, magnesium offcuts and salvaged materials, while works extended physically off the wall in a series of sculptural domes. These projects were often monumental in scale, rivaling paintings and sculpture in both size and physical presence. By the end of his career, Stella had all but dissolved the boundaries between print, painting and sculpture.





Richard Lloyd, International Head of Prints and Multiples, remarks: “Frank Stella did not simply make prints; he reinvented what a print could be, and this sale offers a rare chance to see that evolution unfold. Ken Tyler may have been his most enduring collaborator, but over the decades Stella worked with a range of seminal printers, workshops and publishers, among them Petersburg Press and Waddington Graphics in London, each bringing its own technical repertoire to bear. What strikes me most, looking back across the full sweep of Stella's printmaking, is how little interest he had in repeating himself: no sooner had he mastered one process than he moved on to the next. Each work answered questions raised by what came before while posing new ones of its own. It is a genuine privilege to share with the wider world the results of Stella's extraordinary inventiveness and experimentation, and of the collaborations that made them possible. We are extremely grateful to the Stella family for this opportunity.”