Messeplatz 10, Hall 1.0
Yares Art's debut at Art Basel Unlimited will feature a monumental painting by Larry Poons.
Larry Poons was born in Tokyo in 1937 to American parents. Raised in New York City, he studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston between 1955-57. He turned to painting in 1959 after seeing Barnett Newman’s exhibition at French & Company that year and transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It was not long before Poons made his way to New York and continued his studies at the Art Students League.
The Outerlands (2022), a monumental painting spanning over forty feet in length, is the apotheosis of Poons’s art. The work brings together in one major statement the pictorial and thematic strands that run through his work of the past several decades: dramatic color, virtuosic paint handling, while evoking sensations ofthe natural landscape.
Championed by the famed critic Clement Greenberg, Larry Poons is now one of the most iconic living Color Field artists of our time. The artist’s methodology is distinct from his contemporaries whereby during the artworks’ creation, Poons affixes a ream of raw canvas to his studio wall (usually measuring 1.75 meters by 12.25 meters), encircling himself completely. The artist effectively creates a nebula, surrounded 360 degrees by his work, with no distinct beginning, end, or exit.
It follows that Poons establishes a space of raw and pure creation in which the artwork and the artist exist in a near vacuum, devoid of all else. Once Poons feels the work achieves a level of realization, he determines where to crop the canvas, delineating by masking tape. This generally results in multiple standalone works from every ream of canvas. The Outerlands is the only example in the artist’s oeuvre where he has ever left a canvas entirely uncropped.