Larry Poons

Initially trained as a classical musician at the New England Conservatory of Music, Larry Poons (b. 1937, Tokyo, Japan) shifted decisively toward visual art after encountering Barnett Newman’s 1959 exhibition at French & Company—a moment that catalyzed his lifelong commitment to painting. Poons studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later at the Art Students League of New York, where he would later work as an instructor. 

Poons’ early work of the 1960s, featuring rigorously composed fields of dots and ellipses, aligned him with Op Art and Color Field painting, earning him critical acclaim and inclusion in landmark exhibitions such as The Responsive Eye (1965, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 (1969, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), curated by Henry Geldzahler. Poons's early compositions—mathematically plotted arrangements on vivid monochrome grounds—embodied a logic of optical perception and precision, placing him in dialogue with contemporaries including Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella. 

By the mid-1960s, Poons had begun a radical transformation of his practice. From the 1970s on, Poons’ canvases became increasingly immersive and physically dynamic. He poured, threw, and embedded paint and foreign materials—foam, rope, paper—onto the surface, expanding the dimensionality of the picture plane. In more recent decades, he has returned to the brush, developing a method of working on unstretched canvas wrapped around the circumference of his studio space, producing panoramic environments of layered color. Each roll becomes a sustained act of improvisation, cropped only after the fact—fragments of a larger whole.

Poons’ work has been the subject of major exhibitions and is held in numerous collections worldwide. Throughout his career, he has remained steadfast in his pursuit of tactility, gesture, and chance in painting, continually reimagining the possibilities of the painted surface.