Yares Art is pleased to present Kenneth Noland: Centennial Exhibition commemorating the artist’s birth one hundred years ago. One of the most important and influential artists of his generation, Noland’s abstract paintings balance formal rigor and clarity with expressive color. Focusing primarily on the 1960s, this show features over twenty-five works representing each classic series of that decade — Circles, Cat’s Eyes, Chevrons, Diamonds, and Stripes — in addition to a selection of paintings from the last period of Noland’s career.

The pulsing and rotating bands of color in the Circle paintings Sunwise (1960) and Ember (1960) announced Noland’s interest in dynamic visual space, which he continued to explore in works like Lapis Lazuli (1963), part of his Cat’s Eye series, so named because of their ovoid forms. Though his work remained entirely abstract, Noland explored naturalistic color harmonies through the Chevrons, such as in the autumnal Every Third (1964).

Sloping stripes stacked like shingles characterize many of his Diamond canvases, including two monumental examples from 1966, Slope Shadow and Untitled, never before exhibited. The visual speed and direction of horizontal Stripe works such as Solar Bound (1968) are informed by Noland’s time as a glider pilot in the U.S. Air Force. Later in his career, he returned to earlier formats like the Circle, using a variety of new techniques to develop further avenues for expression within these forms.

Kenneth Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1924. After his military service in World War II, he first studied art at the Black Mountain College before apprenticing with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, where his first solo show was held at Galerie Raymond Creuze in 1949. Noland settled in Washington, DC in the early 1950s where he was instrumental in the formation of the Washington Color School, a tight-knit group of artists that developed new means and methods of composing large-scale paintings with bold color. Following his first solo New York exhibition at Tibor de Nagy in 1957, Noland continued to show annually in major galleries in North America and Europe.

In 1963, Noland moved to Shaftsbury, Vermont, and became part of the circle of artists centered around Bennington College, the “Green Mountain Boys,” along with Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro. That same year, he led the Emma Lake Artist’s Workshop, and, in 1964, was among the artists representing the United States at the XXXII Venice Biennale. The following year, Noland’s first museum show opened at the Jewish Museum in New York. His inclusion in epoch-defining museum exhibitions like Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1964), Three American Painters at the Fogg Art Museum (1965), Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966), and The Art of the Real at the Museum of Modern Art (1968) helped solidify his status as one of America’s leading abstract painters. In 1977, Noland was the subject of a major traveling retrospective that originated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

His work is held in many of the world’s most distinguished museum collections, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Australia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Kunstmuseum, Basel; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Tate Gallery, London; among many others.