YARES ART is pleased to present LARRY POONS: Provocation, Iliad: Powers + Spells, an exhibition of seventeen major works curated by the esteemed critic and art historian, Karen Wilken. At 87, the legendary artist continues to capture his creative powers, as evidenced by the large-scale canvases on view here—all from 2024—which present the audience with unequaled expanses of resonating color and luminosity.

At this juncture in his long career, Poons engages with his own kind of mythmaking, having been inspired in part by Homer’s Iliad. Titles of certain works, such as Tell Me Muses (Powers + Spells #2), Achilles, and Zeus, directly allude to the epic poem, while expansive compositions like Briseis Bright + Bashful, Hat of the Owl, and Fear have an imposing quality that visually parallels the heroic scope of the ancient Greek literary monument. Neither Impressionist nor Expressionist, yet embracing attributes of both genres, Poons conjures a dynamic battleground.

Yet, the layered underpaintings of translucent color he employs are more subtle and emotive than ever before, unlike previous work in which Poons’s compositions display an allover approach, often with several dominant hues. At times, this new series of paintings evoke elements of figuration and landscapes exploding with flora and fauna.

The Color Field pioneer further activates the ethereal spaces with intense clusters of sinuous markings using narrow brushes as well as his hands and fingers. Briseis Bright + Bashful emanates a warm, radiant glow befitting the Homeric princess named in the title. At the upper right corner of the canvas, airy washes of pale pastel colors suggest distant horizons. In the panoramic, horizontal expanse of Fear, one of the largest works on view (nearly 51⁄2 by 16 feet), feverish markings and undulating fields of color shift in tonality from earthy hues on the left to brilliant celestial and aquamarine blues on the right.

His works offer purely sumptuous visual sensation, but not without conflict. In his inimitable visual language, refined over the course of nearly seventy years, he explores the schism between the forces of tumultuous change and immutable, timeless permanence that is the hallmark of great works of art.

Born in Tokyo in 1937 to Anglo-American parents, Poons relocated with his family to the United States at a young age 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. He achieved significant success as a visual artist soon after he moved to New York in the early 1960s. Larry Poons’s work is included in many prominent public and private art collections throughout the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Van Abbe museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among numerous other institutions.