YARES ART SANTA FE is pleased to present a never-before-exhibited body of recent works by Larry Poons painted between 2016 and 2017. A key figure in contemporary art, Larry Poons will debut a series of twelve large, panoramic abstract paintings full of color, light, and rhythmic movement in Santa Fe.

One of the most influential founders of the Color Field movement in the 1960s, Poons is widely regarded today as an American original—a living legend. Over the course of nearly six decades, he has established an international reputation for his consistently dazzling and challenging abstract compositions. In the 1970s, rock star and author Patti Smith referred to Poons ingeniously as “Our cowboy Monet.”

Born in Tokyo, in 1937, to American parents, Poons relocated with his family to the United States, and studied music composition at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Recognizing his greater talent for visual art, he transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied painting. His career soared soon after he moved to New York in the early 1960s. While still in his twenties, he became renowned for a series of hard-edge, abstract compositions featuring colorful dots and lozenge shapes pulsating against monochrome backgrounds of contrasting hues. In subsequent years, he adopted looser and more fluid painting techniques, including pouring and staining, leading to the more gestural works he produces today that continue to center on a hypnotic optical play of light and color.

In addition to his ongoing passion for motorcycle racing, Poons today is producing some of the best paintings of his long career. At nearly eighty, he creates lushly vibrant compositions on a heroic scale, such as Stumble Ahead, Shame by Train, and Sudden Feral, which are among the highlights of the exhibition at Yares Art.

Larry Poons’s work is included in many prominent public and private art collections throughout the world, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern, London; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among many other institutions.