Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936. After graduating from Princeton University in 1958 with a degree in history, he moved to New York to pursue an art career. Stella has stated that artists are faced with two questions: “What to paint” and “How to paint it.” Although he decided to paint abstractly from the beginning, he has chosen to paint in a variety of ways over the years. He used abstract expressionistic brushstrokes in his earliest paintings, but by late 1958 he changed his technique to paint flat black stripes in an all over pattern. With these minimal paintings he aimed to eliminate pictorial illusion so that the image appeared as flat as the canvas on which he painted. Stella also shaped his canvases and constructed his paintings into three-dimensional structures using an array of materials, including metal, wood, and plastic. By the late 1980s, his paintings became fully three-dimensional and could be considered “maximalist” in stark contrast to the “minimalist” paintings of his early career. His work Hacilar Level III, 2000, is a painting on a textured surface that Stella cast from molten aluminum. The dimensional surface introduces real space rather than the illusion of space into his painting.