YARES ART is pleased to present Fields of Color III on view in New York, April 10 – July 31, 2021. This show brings together key works by the most prominent and influential leaders of the Color Field movement: Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolf Gottlieb, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. The nine radiant, large-scale, abstract works in Fields of Color demonstrate the unique visual, and also emotional, impact that the movement’s finest works can offer. Fields of Color III coincides with the exhibition Larry Poons / Frank Stella: As It Was, As It Is, concurrently on view in Yares Art’s adjacent fourth-floor gallery.

Among the exhibition’s high points, Morris Louis’s Gamma Iota (1960), an important example from his “Unfurled” series of mural-size canvases, shows four cascading bands of poured pigment emerging on each side of the raw canvas from the top, meandering toward the bottom center.The cool, fluid bands of blue, green, and turquoise unfurling on the right contrast with the earthier tones of black, orange, and purple of the left-side bands. The spare composition may suggest an image of ocean waves crashing against a steep hillside, although Louis’s work certainly remains rigorously abstract.

Towering figures of recent art history, Adolph Gottlieb and Helen Frankenthaler led the way from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Gottlieb is represented here by one of his signature “Burst” compositions, Pale Splash (1971), in which a hazy, dark orb at the top—suspended in a warm, rust-toned space—hovers above an energetic “burst” in pale pink. One of the most resplendent works of her long career, Frankenthaler’s Debussy (1992) features shimmering pools of cerulean and cobalt blue at left, complemented by richly textured passages of velvety greens and violet and pink, at the center and top right, respectively. Two of Kenneth Noland’s major Hard-edge works are also on view: Sky Island, (1969), a beautiful example of the artist’s horizontal stripes compositions, while the second, titled Crest (1967), is an iconic diamond-shaped canvas energized by three diagonal bands of deep blue, pale blue, and yellow. Side by side, sharing one entire wall with Crest to considerably dramatic effect, is Thomas Downing’s Fainting Angel, painted the same year, featuring hard-edge bands of similar hues.

In Friedel Dzubas’s First Run (1972), hazy, horizontal bands of bright color on the right collide with diagonal swaths of darker hues at left, dissolving into clouds of pale mist. Rounding out the exhibition, Jules Olitski’s Thursday (1962) and Yaksi Juice (1963) are monumental examples of the “Core” seriesof early Color Field works that established his reputation, and which were also the subject of Jules Olitski: Color to the Core, a landmark exhibition that opened at Yares Art last November.