Larry Poons

Larry Poons (born October 1, 1937 in Tokyo , Japan ; lives and works in New York City , USA ) is an American painter and an important representative of contemporary abstract painting in the USA.

life and work

Lawrence Poons was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1937; his parents emigrated with him to the USA in 1938. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1955 to 1957 with the intention of becoming a professional musician. In 1959, however, he began studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston , and also studied at the Art Students League of New York , where he was also to teach.

His work gained importance in the 1960s when he went public with pictures of circles and ovals on often brilliantly colored backgrounds. These paintings conveyed a sense of movement and were categorized as Op Art . Although he exhibited with Op Art artists in 1965, in 1966 he began to move away from optical art and to create more relaxed and more picturesque abstract paintings. His main work is classified into the styles Op-Art, Hard Edge Painting, Color Field Painting , Lyrical Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism .

In 1965 he exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the same year he was a participant in the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil and in 1968 he participated in the 4th documenta in Kassel with five of his pictures .

literature

• Exhibition catalog for the IV. Documenta: IV. Documenta. International exhibition ; Catalog: Volume 1: (Painting and Sculpture); Volume 2: (Graphics / Objects); Kassel 1968
• Kimpel, Harald / Stengel, Karin: documenta IV 1968 International Exhibition - A Photographic Reconstruction (series of publications from the documenta archive); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9

Movie

• 2018: Nathaniel Kahn : The Price of Everything

Web links

• Homepage of the artist
• Examples of his works
• Materials by and about Larry Poons in the documenta archive