ART CITIES:N.York-Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland emerged in the wake of the first generation of the New York School. Interested in breaking away from the prevailing aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he began to experiment with geometric shapes, these evolving into a new kind of picture, where large areas of color were more dominant than any particular shape, which would give their name to Color Field painting, the dominant school of American abstraction after Jackson Pollock.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
In the exhibition “Into the Cool” at Pace Gallery in New York are on presentation 15 of the 18 paintings of Kenneth Noland’s series “Into the Cool”, these works on exhibition for the first time. In 2006, Kenneth Noland started what would turn out to be his final series. The 18 works, created when the artist was in his mid-80s, the works carry additional weight because the artist was losing his eyesight at the time and have never been shown publicly before. Continuing to use his technique, established in the ‘50s, of staining raw canvas with acrylic paint, here Noland has expanded upon it by not only painting the front surface of the canvas, but also working from behind. As with Noland’s earlier work, he continued to apply color as a physical material substance, but unlike his earlier hard edged paintings which rely on fields of dense color, for “Into the Cool” he used color through subtle tone and transparency. Noland achieved this varied application of paint and emphasis on certain colors by using a gel medium, which sits on the surface of the paintings and gives the color a tangible, physical quality. No full understanding of Abstract painting from the ‘50s to the ‘70s is possible without acknowledging Noland’s central and formative position. “I wanted to have colour be the origin of the painting, I was trying to neutralise the layout, the shape, the composition. I wanted to make colour the generating force”. Kenneth Noland studied art at Black Mountain College close to his home town. While at Black Mountain Noland came under the particular influence of Ilya Bolotowsky, who introduced him to the work of the European Constructivists, to Mondrian and the Bauhaus, and also of Albers, with his theories of colour. In1952 he met Morris Louis, a painter with whom he was to work closely until Louis’s early death ten years later. It was to be after a visit with Louis to the studio of Frankenthaler, a fellow painter and close contemporary of theirs, that together they adopted and developed her practice of soaking the unprimed cotton-duck canvas directly with the liquid pigment. While Louis would remain committed to the technique, employing it on an ever more ambitious scale, Noland would soon return to the painted image, albeit remaining ever committed to its impersonal statement and anonymity of surface.
Info: Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, Duration: 26/1-4/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com
