Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Larry Poons
American (b. 1937)
UNTITLED (1974)
acrylic on canvas
97” x 75.5”

STYLE: COLOR FIELD

  

Larry Poons studied with John Cage at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1955-57 before taking up painting, which he studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1959. He had his first solo show in New York in 1963 and was known for his abstract paintings filled with clearly-defined elliptical dots. Poons was associated with the Op Art movement for these works, but in the late sixties the artist began to pour or drip paint onto the canvas, letting it flow down in waterfalls of paint, as in the untitled work here. For this work, Poons became aligned with the Color Field movement. The paintings became thicker and thicker until, in recent years, Poons began to use thicker, shaped surfaces, thinner layers of paint, and barely perceptible representational references.

This untitled painting was made in the earlier stages of Poons’ transition from geometry to flows of paint; rather than viscous, the lines of paint are still delicate, and the canvas beneath is still visible.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Robert Edelman, Art in America, 10/94
"The paint-encrusted canvas has been a Larry Poons trademark for at least 25 years. In that time, Poons has explored the textural nuances of poured paint in a way that makes Morris Louis's canvases seem positively ethereal in comparison. What once appeared a radical break within Poons's work - his shift from the elegant '60s monochrome paintings with dots and ellipses to rougher, defiantly unpolished walls of coagulated pigment - now looks like an almost seamless transition from the mathematical to the material. Poons has always been primarily interested in surface events; the optical illusion of depth implied in the early work has ultimately given way to a shallow relief that suggests an array of detritus dressed up as an archeological site. One would be tempted to assume that Poons equates pictorial content with the sum total of materials employed in these recent heroic-scaled paintings."
Archie Rand, Arts, 1/91
"Poons' narrow loyalty to nonobjectivism makes him the least appropriate of candidates for the production of a socially conscious art. But the visceral ramifications of his paintings, which have been kidded as being reminiscent of regurgitation, obliquely plug Poons, of all people, into the post-minimal mind/body routine. More recently, the addition of industrial garbage has wafting about it a tinge of environmentalism. Abbot and Costello back up to avoid each other and completing the circle, bump into each others rears...His passive glob is ultimately under the laws of gravity, while throwing the paint exhibits an insistence on making an action, any action, that will maintain testament to his passage...From '66 to '74 the evidence of direct wrist contact was gradually reduced as the lozenges dissolved, coagulated, expanded, gained mass and formed what Michael Fried referred to as 'elephant skin.'...In this scenario the dissolution of self is seen as quite an accomplishment...In the paintings of Larry Poons we are privy not to an appreciation of geology but rather to the involuntary and hard-slaked lust of the archeologist."
Kenneth Johnson, Art in America, 9/90
"...the prevailing appeal of Larry Poons' work is to the senses--both visual and tactile...The immediate stimulating actuality of the art work...Poons has worked steadily to maximize material impact from the luscious vertically striated rainlike flows of paint of the 70s to the current massively encrusted works...the paintings refuse to budge from the realm of the factual. They frustrate readings of illusion or metaphor"
Barry Schwabsky, Artforum, 9/94, "Irreplacable Hue"
"A generation younger than Noland and Olitski, Poons was a relative latecomer to the Color Field group. His best-known works, the dot paintings of the early-to-mid '60s, occupy the same fertile zone between Minimalism and Color Field painting as some of Noland's work of this period, as well as that of Stella. It was only until the end of the decade that Poons began pouring and pushing his paint to arrive at a facture equally distant from the manual and from the mechanical, a mode typical of Color Field. The first results of this conversion, if that's what it was, were remarkable: dense rainstorms of turbid color that still overpower the efforts of many subsequent fetishists of the drip...Like Olitski, Poons today is an energetic exponent of the ultrafunky relief-like surface. His fascination with pouring has led to canvases suggesting oceanic spills of detritus...this work transmutes the tragic art of Abstract Expressionism, empowered by ideas of myth and heroic sacrifice, into a disenchanted, countertranscendental immersion in the mud and debris of mundane and earthbound confusion..."