ART CITIES: London-Kenneth Noland

The American painter Kenneth Noland is associated with a number of American Abstract Art Movements, including: the Washington Colour Painter (a mini school of Abstract Expressionism, whose paintings focus above all on the relationship between colour and structure), Colour Field Painting, Hard Edge Painting and Minimalism. As Kenneth Noland said “Paintings have their own boundaries, their own zones, their own limits”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Stripes/Plaids/Shapes” surveys canvases from a significant period in the Kenneth Noland’s career. Marking Noland’s first solo presentation in London for more than two decades, this exhibition chart the development of his iconic “Stripe paintings” of the late 1960s through to his “Shape canvases” in the early 1980s. A founding member of the Washington Color School – which included figures such as Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, and Alma Thomas – Noland was instrumental in creating the language of post-war abstraction in the US. His experimental approach to form, material, and color gave rise to radical works that redefined the notion of painting. Between 1946 and 1948, Noland studied at the Black Mountain College in his native North Carolina where he was exposed to the ideas of seminal figures such as Josef Albers and John Cage and developed an early interest in the expressive potential of color and chance. His mature style would come to render color a resonant force and built a visual language that included Circles, Chevrons, as well as the series on view in this current exhibition. By the late 1950s, Noland began exhibiting his first, now iconic, canvases composed of concentric circles of various colors. In the early 1960s, feeling that the “Circle” painting motif had been exhausted, he began expanding his formal composition to include abstracted chevrons. A selection of his works, alongside those by Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and others, were included by Greenberg in the seminal group exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the term was coined by Clement Greenberg, and has largely been associated with all the artists shown in the exhibition since. Later the same year, Noland participated in representing the United States at the Venice Biennale, where he showed both his “Circle” and “Chevron” paintings alongside work by Morris Louis, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

The exhibition “Stripes/Plaids/Shapes”  begins with early examples of the artist’s striped works from the late 1960s, such as “Early Flight” (1969) or “Via Mojave” (1968), both of which stretch horizontally across several meters to expand beyond the viewer’s peripheral vision and evoke the feel of a vast, enveloping landscape. Noland would use an array of techniques to apply the bands of color in specific proportions, including staining the raw canvas or using a traditional paint roller, to create textural variation. In choosing acrylic paint, which cannot be reworked as easily as oil, Noland embraced the risk factor, quipping that he was a ‘one-shot painter’. Regardless of the technique used, Noland’s painting practice intentionally removed traces of the artist’s hand in order to focus attention on the materiality of the works, while also allowing for chance reactions where the bands of paint meet. Following his poured circle paintings of the late 1950s, Noland’s paintings of the 1960s were in radical opposition to the gestural, painterly canvases of Abstract Expressionism which had dominated the American art scene of the mid-20th century. At the turn of the 1970s, Noland began including vertical stripes over his horizontal bands. The resulting works, titled Plaid paintings, draw parallels to the paintings of Piet Mondrian, an early influence on Noland via his Black Mountain teacher Ilya Bolotowsky, a well-documented proponent of De Stijl art theory. However, unlike Mondrian, Noland’s lines retained the soft blur of stained canvas, creating a quasi-alchemical effect as the colors overlap and knit together. In “Interface” (1973), striking lines of warm yellow, orange, green, red, and sky blue interweave across the diamond shaped canvas, inviting viewers to closely examine the interaction of color, form, and mark. In the ensuing years, Noland continued his experimentation by turning his attention to the canvas support itself. By creating shaped paintings that took unusual, asymmetrical forms, Noland emphasized the objecthood of the painting. In “Glean” (1977) and “Field of Green” (1978), the picture plane is stained with earth-toned hues of green while borders of brightly colored stripes are positioned opposite one another, creating a spatial tension in the composition. These works, with their large expanses of a single color, have a textural richness resulting from the paint’s interaction with the raw canvas and the artist’s distinct and often uneven application.

Photo: Kenneth Noland, Minted Morning, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 128.5 cm × 297.3 cm (50-9/16″ × 9′ 9-1/16″) framed, © The Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY

Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 25/1-4/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/