Danese

Danese is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Larry Poons. The opening reception will be held from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., Thursday, February 12. The exhibition will continue through March 14.

In this recent body of work, Poons embraces the chromatic worlds of music and color, creating along the way a visual and emotional environment ripe with gesture, raw energy and improvisation. One of America’s preeminent artists, Poons remains at the top of his game; his broadly horizontal paintings, averaging 6 by 9 feet, consist of skeins of color that bump, loop and slide into one another, inviting the viewer on a circuitous journey of abstract narration. Robert Pincus-Witten observes in the catalogue text: accumulating freshly-made gestures or suddenly-discovered past ones, Poons instrumentalizes chance (the very hallmark of Abstract Expressionist painting) as he moves along the canvas causeway… the painting oscillates back and forth from the local to the universal.¹ Traces of remembered landscape and distant figures surge and then withdraw into small energetic registers of cascading strokes.² Intensely individual and intimate, each definitive brushstroke becomes a part of the whole - the short and frenetic, the calm and the considered, the bold edge of confidence - an arena of action tamed by the sublime. From the novembrist, oaken, dank palette³ of Armorer (2007) to the light-filled airy spirit of Tears for More (Blakelock) (2008), Poons’s colors engage and enrapture.

Larry Poons was born in 1937 in Tokyo and was raised in New York. In 1955, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music, and two years later transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was given his first one-man exhibition in 1963 at Richard Bellamy’s famed Green Gallery, and in 1965 his work was included in MoMA’s celebrated exhibition The Responsive Eye. In 1969, he was the youngest artist featured in curator Henry Geldzahler’s landmark exhibition, New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970. In 1981, the MFA Boston organized an exhibition of his paintings from the 1970s. The work of Larry Poons is included in major museum and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. He currently lives and works in New York.

¹ Pincus-Witten, Robert. Larry Poons. New York: Danese, 2009. 
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.