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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Luis Frangella (July 6, 1944 - December 7, 1990) was a painter and sculptor.
Frangella was born in Buenos Aires in 1944. He began to paint in the mid-1970's during a fellowship to the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. He moved to New York City in 1976, and in the early 1980's he helped to organize some of the first exhibitions at Limbo, an artists' after-hours club known for its art shows and film screenings. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.
Equally at ease with painting and sculpture, Frangella could also alternate between extreme delicacy and robust muscularity. His 1984 exhibition at the Civilian Warfare gallery in the East Village featured expressionistic paintings executed on old car doors that seemed to sum up the rough-edged styles of many East Village artists.
In the late 1980's, Frangella had two shows at the Julian Pretto Gallery in SoHo and exhibited regularly in galleries in Buenos Aires and in Spain in Barcelona and Madrid.
He died on December 7, 1990, at his home in Manhattan. He was 46 years old. He died of AIDS, his family said.
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