ART CITIES:London-Larry Poons
Larry Poons has been at the forefront of Abstract American painting since the beginning of his career in the 1960s. Having moved to New York in 1959, Poons became known for his Op-Art paintings in 1962, with his monochrome spatial and chromatic experiments. In 1967, Poons abandoned these structural paintings and began a new epoch of ‘drip paintings’, in which lozenges of paint in varying colours are poured from above onto a vertical canvas, creating monumental and energetically charged and textured paintings, recalling the work of Willen de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
When the curator Henry Geldzahler featured Larry Poons’ work in the landmark exhibition “New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970”, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened in late 1969, he devoted the show’s culminating gallery to the artist that at 32, Poons was the youngest included. The exhibition “Works from 1976 to the Present“ constitutes a concise Larry Poons survey that picks up where Geldzhaler’s show left off. It includes a representative work of the 1970s, “Yellow Cat on Hand” (1976), a marvelous example of his richly textured “Throw” paintings. Here, cascades of innumerable rivulets of pigment flow down the large canvas like a mesmerizing waterfall. In these works, Poons embraces chance, as well as the laws of gravity. With prolonged viewing, the composition’s intense vertical thrust, combined with the constantly shifting range of indeterminate color, becomes arresting. Its dazzling sense of up-and-downward motion provokes a visual sensation not unlike the flickering optical effect of the contrasting colors in his earlier “Dots” paintings. By the 1980s, Poons was renowned as one of the pioneers of Color Field painting, but defying expectations, he shifted away from a focus on pure color, and furthered his experiments with texture, enhancing the already rich impasto of his surfaces. In works such as “The 4 Fenton Bros” (1985) and “Carioca” (1986), he applied bits of foam rubber and crumbled paper to the canvas in order to slow the movement of the numerous layers of thrown paint. The results are enthralling allover compositions of richly nuanced textures and often earthy colors that recall rocky cliff faces or lichen-covered hillsides on a rainy day. The large 1990 composition “Music” is a key work in Poons’ evolution, it alludes to Poons’ background in music, as well as his lifelong interest in it, and the work introduces a new, idiosyncratic type of pictorialism within his oeuvre. It represents a bold step forward, away from the constraints of Greenbergian formalism associated with the early days of Color Field painting, with its emphasis on flat surfaces and pure, unmodulated color. In works of the early 21st century, Poons developed a distinctive pictorial language—in compositions of heightened color and crisp drawing—that often suggests landscape. In fact, the imagery of undulating geometric shapes, organic and architectonic forms, and searing color in works such as “One Inch Less Wild” (2001) and “Ash Nobody” (2000) was inspired by his many cross-country motorcycle trips. A senior-division champion, Poons would annually traverse the United States on motorcycle, accompanied by his wife, artist Paula De Luccia. These works may be viewed as an homage to the various desert vistas and mountainous terrain of America that Poons knows so well. The artist, however, has transposed these landscape memories into his own painterly vocabulary of light and color. In recent works, such as “Happy Carlo” (2017) and “Centaur” (2020) with their frenetically shifting clouds of light and color, realized by means of countless bravura touches of pigment, Poons demonstrates his virtuosity with seemingly effortless panache. Already an art-historical figure, widely regarded as among the foremost colorists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Poons is as relevant today as ever. With the vibrant, energetic, and surprising works he continues to produce, he reinforces his stature as one of the most significant artists of this moment.
Photo: Larry Poons, Ash Nobody, 2020, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 198.8 x 300.4 cm / 78 1/4 x 118 1/4 in, © Larry Poons, courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, London, England, Duration: 3/6-31/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, www.alminerech.com
