Yares Art is pleased to present Penelope Krebs: Seasons of Color, on view from July 13–September 16, 2017. This will be the California-based artist’s first major solo show in New York, after a long career of successful exhibitions throughout the United States.

Featuring new work painted between 2016 and 2017, the exhibition will include sixteen dynamic abstract compositions, titled accordingly with the months and seasons of the year, as well as an installation of seventy-two smaller works on paper. Demonstrative of an artistic career devoted to developing an oeuvre of hard-edged geometric abstractions, these new paintings solidify Krebs’s place at the forefront of second-generation Color-Field painters. Her studies under such luminaries as John McCracken and James Hayward, pioneers of the Minimalist and California Light and Space movements, clearly influenced the direction of her work, but it is where her practice deviates from that of her mentors that shows her capacity for true innovation, and grants her work its iconic character.

Composed on large-scale canvases (five by five feet), Krebs’s paintings explore the relationships between tone, hue, and value by juxtaposing four vertical bands of similar colors to create a singular visual experience. As Krebs herself has said, “The colors are to be viewed immediately and simultaneously in time, and as one entity.” Producing between ten and forty preparatory drawings for each canvas, these studies convey the concurrently intuitive and intellectual nature of the works, and her practice. She dedicates herself to the process, however, and the colors of each canvas “are chosen through trial and error, without any preconceived plan, until color resolves itself as an abstract idea.”

Executed with almost mechanical precision, Krebs achieves her opaque and highly saturated color fields by methodically layering thin coats of oil paint onto the canvas. Foregoing any metaphorical or symbolic embellishments, Krebs allows the colors to speak for themselves, both individually and as a collection; the canvases are formally minimal, but experientially forceful.

Krebs’s work has been shown extensively over the last four decades, including eight solo shows at the influential Kiyo Higashi Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, until its close in 2000. Krebs’s paintings were also included in such seminal exhibitions as Abstract Painting 1980 in 1980 at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, L.A. Current: The Female Perspective in 1996 at the Hammer Museum, and Pop Abstraction in1998 at the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She currently resides in Morongo Valley, California.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by Sarah S. King.