Image courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York

Credit. Inlaid printed matter with linen tape on rice paper, 57 x 31 in. (144.8 x 78.7 cm) (framed). Courtesy of the artist and greengrassi, London

Credit. Inkjet print on paper and multichannel projection with sound, vinyl text and takeaway posters, 7:20 min., Edition 3 of 5. Purchased jointly by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with funds provided by mer Museum, Los Angeles

Photo by Elon Schoenholz

A 2008 collage inspired by a letter from a friend lamenting that Stark had been neglecting her writing in favor of making art.

Credit. Mixed media on canvas on panel, 69 x 89 in. (175.3 x 226.1 cm). https://worldsingledating.com/es/meetme-opinion/ Collection of Nancy and Joachim Bechtle, San Francisco. Image courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer

Another such origin story takes place one sunny day in an L.A. skate park in 2012, when Stark spotted a handsome man who was reading a book called “The Art of Seduction.” She struck up a conversation with him about the book, which she recalls made her think of the 18th-century writer and adventurer Giacomo Casanova, whose memoirs she was reading at the time. The two became friends of a sort; when the man, Brandon Martin, texted her weeks later to say that he’d just spent five days in jail on false charges, she, more than a little curious, picked him up at a Metro station and drove him to a friend’s house. At some point during their encounter, Stark had the idea to include Martin in an audio project for which she had been commissioned by the Frieze Art Fair. When they finally met to work on the piece, he suggested his friend Bobby could handle the recording.

The resulting artwork, based on Stark’s encounter with the two young men, was titled “Trapped in the VIP and/or In Mr. Martin’s Inoperable Cadillac.” Stark has an unusual speaking voice, a semi-stoned drawl that is both laconic and vulnerable-sounding, and an ability to listen to people very intently. The threesome’s meandering conversation about race and life in what Bobby referred to as “planet hood” touched on Martin’s impounded car, chronic run-ins with the police and the culture of lynching in the American South – and was installed, with the pitch-perfect sense of social critique that Stark’s admirers have come to expect, in the sound systems of the Frieze BMWs that ferried V.I.P.s to and from the art fair.

A still frame from “My Best Thing,” 2011, in which avatars speak lines of dialogue taken from Stark’s conversations with lovers

Stark, in other words, is an artist who is not afraid of being difficult. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that she exists in that rare Bermuda Triangle of being simultaneously feted by fellow artists and critics (it is not uncommon to hear that she is someone’s “favorite” artist) while remaining relatively unknown to a larger public. Although she is represented by four major international galleries and has two midcareer retrospectives at major American museums this year alone, her work does not bring in the astronomical sums associated with many of her contemporaries, or even, as she wryly observes, some of her former students at U.S.C. At a time when artists are encouraged to produce large, digestible objects for collectors’ homes, Stark persists in producing works – at a slow pace, no less – of extraordinary nuance and complexity. “She’s not exactly making easy-to-sell paintings,” agreed Ali Subotnick, who is curating Stark’s upcoming retrospective at the Hammer Museum at U.C.L.A. “People like artists to produce the same thing over and over, and Frances is constantly changing.”