Larry Poons

Larry Poons (b. 1937) is one of the most inventive American painters of his generation, whose long career has moved through several major stylistic transformations while maintaining a consistent commitment to the expressive possibilities of color and painterly surface. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Poons initially pursued music, studying at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1955 until 1957. His developing interest in the paintings of Piet Mondrian, particularly the geometric rhythms of the Boogie Woogie pictures, gradually led him away from music and toward the practice of visual art. He then decided to enroll at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, where he would develop the foundation for his mature artistic career.

Poons first came to prominence in the early 1960s as a central figure within the Optical Art and Color Field movements, producing precisely composed paintings in which small dots and lozenges of color were arranged across saturated grounds to produce shimmering optical effects. These early paintings placed him at the forefront of a new generation of American abstract painters, and they earned him early recognition alongside artists such as Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and other important voices of the postwar American abstract scene. Over the following decades, however, Poons continually reinvented his practice, moving through an extended series of stylistic shifts that included heavily poured and dripped surfaces, thickly encrusted textures approaching relief sculpture, and more recently a return to gestural painterly composition.

During his career Poons has held more than sixty solo exhibitions in galleries around the world, and he was fortunate to achieve substantial success early in his career and to enjoy representation by several prominent contemporary art galleries. His paintings have appeared in many important group exhibitions as well, and a number of respected museums have added his pictures to their permanent collections. His works also hang in the collections of leading private art collectors, and numerous books and publications have been devoted to his work and career.

Poons resides today in New York City, where he teaches at the Art Students League, while also maintaining studios in Florida and upstate New York. He continues to develop new bodies of work with unabated energy, extending the possibilities of contemporary American painting well into the twenty-first century.