Larry Poons (American, b. Japan 1937) "Fiddle Stop"

Provenance Note: The Nina Freudenheim Gallery served as an important venue for Larry Poons in the 1970s, especially as he transitioned into his "elephant-skin" phase. The gallery was not just a commercial space but a curatorial platform that supported experimentation and new ideas in abstraction. Poons’s exhibitions there helped establish him as a leading figure in American abstraction during a time of significant change in the art world.
During Poons’s exhibitions at Freudenheim’s gallery, his work was critically reviewed in prominent publications like Artforum and Art in America. These reviews often praised his ability to combine color and texture in new and exciting ways, and critics were especially drawn to the material nature of his paintings.
The gallery’s role in exhibiting Poons in this context was crucial for broadening his visibility. As art critics and curators took notice, Poons’s work began to resonate not just in New York but also in international art circles. Larry Poons has always been something of a maverick who trusts his instincts and never minds fashion. He first became known in the early 1960s for stripped down "dot" paintings whose combination of evenly stained color, punctuated with small precise lozenges, aligned him with Color Field, Minimalism and Op Art in one fell swoop. By the late 1960s, he had gone heavy-duty, creating thick, creviced topographies of paint poured on horizontal unstretched canvases soon designated the "Elephant Skin" series.
By 1971, the canvas was back on the wall, and Mr. Poons was throwing paint from cans and buckets, always aiming high. It ran down the surface in thick rivulets as funkily literal as they are associational. Words like vines, rain, waterfalls and fountains run through the mind in this rare and wonderful show, titled "Ruffles Queequeg + The Throw Decade 1971-1981." (The reference to Queequeg of "Moby Dick" fame is a transitional wavelike work.) I can imagine these pieces holding their own against Monet’s "Waterlilies." In an essay in the catalog, Frank Stella, the painter and Mr. Poons’s friend, calls him "Mr. Natural," which seems accurate.

Larry Poons (American, b. 1937)
Larry Poons, born October 1, 1937 in Tokyo, Japan, is an abstract artist who began painting in 1959 and continues apace today. Though he originally rose to fame for his Op Art paintings of the 1960s – with monochrome canvases replete with staccato marks that draw the eye across the surface in a frenetic dance – Poons’ practice has shifted through various aesthetic modes, most recently in a loose, painterly style akin to abstract expressionism or lyrical abstraction.
Poons studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Students League of New York in the early 1960s. In 1965, MoMA curator William Seitz included Poons in “The Responsive Eye” along with Josef Albers, Larry Bell, Ellsworth Kelly, and Ad Reinhardt. In 1969, Poons was the youngest artist to participate in "New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970,” curated by Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other artists included in the landmark survey were Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jules Olitsky.
Poons now lives and works in New York, returning to the League in 1997 where he continues to teach.