The story of Stella’s art is, arguably, the story of late twentieth-century American painting. What more can he possibly do at this point? And how might his style in old age add to our picture of this artistic period? From the Studio at Yares Art, a visionary art dealer, offers an original, surprising answer to these questions.
The artist Larry Poons has been recognized over the years by major critics as a multi-disciplinary rebel in the New York art world. His status as a painter began to emerge when Poons began painting hard-edge dots on fields of color in the early 1960s. This culminated in a series of works pre-dating his deeply gestural, color-based collisions, from which he would eventually instigate throwing and pouring paint in a highly personal manner. This would become apparent in the early 70s and continue throughout the 80s and beyond.
"If only we could make paintings that look as good as the paint,” Larry Poons once said to me as he contemplated a bucket of unnameable hues loosely swirled together. He sounded wistful, but he fulfilled that ambition many times over during his long life as a painter—and has been recognized for that achievement.
In some way, The Outerlands at Yares Art New York picks up where the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition left off, more than fifty years later. This museum-worthy show, organized by gallery director Nicolas Graille, contains thirty-one large canvases in acrylic and mixed media, and nine works on paper, spanning the early eighties up to this year. Coinciding with the publication of the first-ever comprehensive career monograph on the artist, Poons, published by Abbeville Press (to which I contributed an essay), the exhibition traces Poons’s evolution beyond hard-edge abstraction, Ab Ex and Color Field.
From stunning examples of Delftware to an enormous gilded bookcase, this year’s edition of TEFAF Maastricht brings no shortage of eye candy.
In celebration of what would have been the year that Jules Olitski (1922–2007) turned one hundred, Yares Art presents just as many of the painter’s works in this marvelous retrospective, which covers every aspect of his long career.
Shows in Hartford and New York spotlight great works by Milton Avery from every decade, and those of Sally Michel, who helped shape her husband's art.
The installation of his sculpture marks a homecoming for the 85-year-old artist, whose diptych at the World Trade Center was destroyed on 9/11.
At Yares Art on Fifth Avenue is a stupendous show. It is entitled "Kenneth Noland: Context is the Key -- Paintings: 1958-1970" (through January 22, 2022). I don't know quite what "context" Yares refers to. Certainly the socioeconomic and political troubles of that far-off era, while they may seem trifling in retrospect, were no less dire at the time than our current evils seem today. Maybe the gallery is thinking in esthetic terms of the '60s as a period when the sun of modernism wasn't yet as nearly obscured by the clouds of anti-modernism, the way it is today. Whatever. Anyway, it's a helluva show.
At Yares Art, on Fifth Avenue 34 blocks south of the Jewish Museum, we have two eminently satisfactory exhibitions of more recent abstract art. The first is "Larry Poons/Frank Stella: As It Was/As It Is." The second is "Fields of Color III"(both through July 31). They afford a contrast that parallels my own development as a writer on abstraction. The first show equates to a period before I'd awakened to abstraction, and before I'd met either artist. The second represents a period after I'd met them both, and after Bill Rubin had sensitized me to abstraction--though much of the work in it was also done prior to the spring of 1968 (when Rubin effected this sensitization).
Olitski’s paintings were racing at the fore of their moment, as if the artist could see ahead to the psychedelic biomorphs later emblazoned on headshop posters.
Catalogue essays for commercial galleries are a special form of literature. Although their writers are frequently referred to as "critics," these writers do not criticize in the sense that reviewers for independent publications might. As a rule, too, their essays are expected to focus on the works that the gallery will be displaying in this particular show, and to correlate their remarks with the presentation itself.
The artist’s earliest Color Field paintings, with their indomitable colors, austere compositions and wild pictorial spaces, are among the movement’s signal achievements.
I don't have much to say about "Jules Olitski: Color to the Core: Paintings 1960-1964" at Yares Art on Fifth Avenue (through January 30). That is partly because I have often written about Olitski, and his enormous talents are well-known to many if not most of my readers. It is also partly because I want to post this review as early as possible in the new year, in hopes of alerting more viewers in time for them to get to the show itself. Let nobody think I don't admire it! Au contraire, I found it sensational, a terrific feast for the eyes and strongly recommended in fair times or foul. Don't miss it!
On “The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum & “Jules Olitski: Color to the Core” at Yares Art, New York.
Exhibition running through Oct. 27. Yares Art, East 57th Street, Manhattan; 212-256-0969, yaresart.com.
Noland’s current exhibition at Yares Art, brings together prime examples of one of the artist’s signature motifs: concentric rings of color centrally and symmetrically ordered in square canvases.
“We came to New York because we want to champion the most under-recognized and under-valued segment of the art market—Color Field Painting,” said Dennis Yares, founder of Yares Art, a pioneering gallery that has advanced modern abstract art on the West Coast and beyond since the 1960s.