YARES ART is pleased to present Larry Poons: One for Baby, an exhibition of major works by the legendary painter now widely regarded as one of the greatest practitioners of post-war abstraction still active today. As evidenced by the large-scale, never-before-shown works highlighted in this exhibition, the Color Field pioneer, now 86, is doing some of the best work of his six-decade career. With sumptuous brushwork full of light and energy, these new works by Poons, such as One Person Twice and Dante (both 2023), feature expansive panoramic scenes with subtly shifting pools of color. Poons activates these color fields by means of fervid clusters of vigorous markings in thin, jagged, and sinuous lines made with narrow brushes and the artist’s fingers.

Other paintings featured, including The Water Calmed—The Ducks Take a Swim, Crying Dark Shadow Ducks (2023), convey the atmospheric qualities and timeless draw of nature through thick layered brushstrokes of vibrant whirls and expanses of color—without being representational or descriptive in any way. In resplendent compositions like No Lost Time P. Smith (2023), and Babbis (Sushi McFits) (2024), Poons aims for pure visual poetry. As the late art critic Barbara Rose remarks in Poons, a career monograph recently published by Abbeville Press, “A conversation with Poons . . . may veer [from] the composition and color of [Peter Paul] Rubens . . . to the heroic monumentality of [Barnett] Newman.” Indeed, in his work, Poons merges the sensuousness of a Baroque painter like Rubens with the imposing austerity of Newman’s expansive and spare modernist compositions.

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. An avid motorcyclist, who races vintage bikes even in his eighth decade, Poons lives and works in New York City and upstate New York with his wife, the artist Paula DeLuccia.

Larry Poons’s work is included in many prominent public and private art collections internationally, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; 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 Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; 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 numerous other institutions.