"There's something always instinctively visually right about nature. There's no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it's great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightness, about it."
- Larry Poons
The artist in his studio 2018.
Born in 1937 in Tokyo, Japan, American painter Larry Poons initially pursued a career in music. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston from 1955 to 1959, but following a visit to a Barnett Newman exhibition at French & Company in New York City in 1959, he changed course and instead began his pursuit of the visual arts. He subsequently enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After completing his studies there, he moved to New York to devote himself full time to artistic practice.
Poons held his first solo show in 1963 at Richard Bellamy’s celebrated Green Gallery, and two years later his work was included in the influential exhibition The Responsive Eye, held at the Museum of Modern Art. Poons’s early work from the 1960s was decidedly “optical” in the viewpoint set out by the MoMA show. Composing his paintings according to a mathematically determined series of points and carefully chosen color schemes, Poons was able to eliminate the “hand of the artist,” an artistic strategy also being pursued at the time by his close friend Frank Stella.
Turned His Head
2017
Acrylic on canvas
67 3/4 x 153 1/4 inches
172.1 x 389.3cm
Eventually Poons came to feel that the purely optical approach to making art was restricting, and in the late 1970s he began to work by pouring and throwing paint on the canvas—again in an attempt to compose a painting without leaving traces of the artist’s hand. It was also during this period that he began attaching miscellaneous materials to the canvas—foam balls, for example, or rope. In the 1990s, Poons returned to using a paintbrush, working on rolls of canvas unfurled across the four walls of his studio, so that he could immerse himself in the work as he made it. At the end of this process, he would painstakingly crop out individual paintings from the massive length of each roll.
Nowadays, Poons splits his time between studios in New York City and East Durham, New York. His work continues to be shown widely and most recently was included in the international traveling exhibition, Painting afterPostmodernism, Belgium— USA(2016-18), curated by Barbara Rose. In 2018, Poons was featured in the HBO documentary The Price of Everything: An Art World Odyssey directed by Nathaniel Kahn. His tireless and inimitable trajectory of artistic experimentation has made his work sought after by both private collectors and institutions, and is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
LARRY POONS (b. 1937)
The Shopkeeper's Bell
2021
Acrylic on canvas
67 5/8 x 113 5/8 inches
171.8 x 334.3cm
LARRY POONS (b. 1937)
Orphans To Each Other I
2024
Acrylic on canvas
63 1/2 x 119 1/2 inches
161.3 x 303.5 cm
LARRY POONS (b. 1937)
Powers + Spells #4, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
62 1/2 x 78 1/4 inches
158.8 x 198.8 cm
Larry Poons began painting hard-edge dots at the outset. Later, he developed a genuinely immersive Color Field approach. His current show at Yares Art, One for Baby, takes a different approach, but these are some of his best works in decades. This series of paintings holds together intensely gestural, color-based collisions made by throwing and pouring paint. Even so, Poons’s subtle brushwork finds its way into a place where maintenance of color depicts stillness in a place of perfection. At the same time, some of the paintings reveal vigorous markings that see their order regained while openly awakened from one to another.
The artist Larry Poons has been recognized over the years by major critics as a multi-disciplinary rebel in the New York art world. His status as a painter began to emerge when Poons began painting hard-edge dots on fields of color in the early 1960s. This culminated in a series of works pre-dating his deeply gestural, color-based collisions, from which he would eventually instigate throwing and pouring paint in a highly personal manner. This would become apparent in the early 70s and continue throughout the 80s and beyond.
"If only we could make paintings that look as good as the paint,” Larry Poons once said to me as he contemplated a bucket of unnameable hues loosely swirled together. He sounded wistful, but he fulfilled that ambition many times over during his long life as a painter—and has been recognized for that achievement.
In some way, The Outerlands at Yares Art New York picks up where the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition left off, more than fifty years later. This museum-worthy show contains thirty-one large canvases in acrylic and mixed media, and nine works on paper, spanning the early eighties up to this year. Coinciding with the publication of the first-ever comprehensive career monograph on the artist, Poons, published by Abbeville Press (to which I contributed an essay), the exhibition traces Poons’s evolution beyond hard-edge abstraction, Ab Ex and Color Field.
At Yares Art, on Fifth Avenue 34 blocks south of the Jewish Museum, we have two eminently satisfactory exhibitions of more recent abstract art. The first is "Larry Poons/Frank Stella: As It Was/As It Is." The second is "Fields of Color III"(both through July 31). They afford a contrast that parallels my own development as a writer on abstraction. The first show equates to a period before I'd awakened to abstraction, and before I'd met either artist. The second represents a period after I'd met them both, and after Bill Rubin had sensitized me to abstraction--though much of the work in it was also done prior to the spring of 1968 (when Rubin effected this sensitization).
Exhibition running through Oct. 27. Yares Art, East 57th Street, Manhattan; 212-256-0969, yaresart.com.
