Larry Poons: Creations of Sound

A Swedish debut, a New York legacy

The first major exhibition of Larry Poons’s work in Sweden, at Wetterling Gallery, is a significant cultural event. To appreciate fully the lively energy of these contemporary paintings, one needs to look back at their origins in the revolutionary art scene of New York in the 1960s and 70s. Poons’s career is by no means a straight line, but a series of brilliant, restless evolutions, characterised by a reluctance to be categorised and a constant questioning of painting itself. To understand the vital painter of today, we first need to fathom the precocious master of optical precision of the 1960s and the radical apostle of material physicality of the 1970s. By following this history of restless experimentation, we see the fundamental breakthroughs that inform these powerful, liberated paintings currently on show.

Part I — The shock of the new: New York’s art scene in the 1960s

Larry Poons did not simply appear out of a void, but from a maelstrom. New York’s art scene in the early 1960s was a divided, disputed and exciting landscape defined by the long shadow of abstract expressionism and the aggressive growth of a new, cooler generation. The heroic, “hot” expressionism of painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, which had dominated American post-war art with an emphasis on spontaneous personal expression and the physical act of painting, started to feel academic to younger artists. This created a power vacuum, a space of enormous opportunities that was quickly filled by many, often competing, theories on abstraction.

The rise of competing abstractions

The artistic climate was characterised by a definite rejection of abstract expressionism’s emotional turbulence in favour of an objective, systematic and intellectual stringency. This reaction manifested itself in several key movements that would provide the immediate context for Poons’s debut.

The first of these was colour-field painting, an offshoot of abstract expressionism that aimed to purge art from what its proponents considered to be exaggerated rhetoric. This movement paved the way for artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and was further reinforced by a second wave of artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who focused on the pure, undiminished power of colour itself. Colour-field painters worked with large, flat, poured or stained surfaces of solid colour and obliterated individual brushstrokes, preferring a uniform, monolithic image that emphasised the optical over the gestural. Newly available acrylic paint, with its flowing viscosity and lively hues, was the ideal medium for this approach and enabled artists to stain bare canvases and explore colour with marvellous intensity.

In parallel with this was minimalism, a more radical and austere variant. The minimalism that evolved in New York in the early 1960s advocated the extreme simplification of form, often through basic geometric shapes and monochromatic palettes. Artists including Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Carl Andre relinquished the expressive superfluousness of the previous generation and adopted a cool anonymity and industrial materials, such as glass fibre, sheet metal and aluminium. They strove to create “primary structures” and “specific objects” that erased the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and eradicated all signs of the artist’s hand and all metaphorical and spiritual associations. The aim was to create purely objective art, literal art, that was what it was, with no hidden meanings.

A third and more populist movement was op art, based on creating powerful optical illusions and a sense of movement, vibration or pulsation, through precise use of patterns and contrasting colours. Artists such as Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz created works that were not intended to be interpreted, but experienced, and acted directly on the viewer’s retina to produce physiological sensations and afterimages.

This ferment was not restricted to the uptown galleries. The broader cultural atmosphere, especially in Downtown New York, was characterised by intense experimentation and dissolution of artistic boundaries. In SoHo lofts and the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, a tightly knit group of creative communities grew that included painters, musicians, sculptors and performance artists. This “downtown scene” got its energy from a spirit of collaboration and a nonchalant attitude to traditional hierarchies that separated high art from mass culture. People like Andy Warhol were key figures who moved freely between uptown art circles and the underground scenes spanning film, poetry and music.

This cross-disciplinary environment, where visual artists played in bands and performance artists made videos, is crucial to understanding Poons, who was himself a trained musician and an active participant in this cross-pollination.

And so, New York’s art scene in the 1960s was not one single, unified front, but a dynamic ecosystem of competing ideas. Abstract expressionism’s downfall had cleared the way for a new avant-garde, but one that spoke many tongues. It was in this complex and highly charged setting that Larry Poons launched his career. His immediate and meteoric success can be attributed to the remarkable manner in which his early work successfully synthesised the core principles of these divergent movements. His paintings were a “perfect storm” that simultaneously engaged with the primary aesthetical issues being debated across the entire spectrum of contemporary art.

As one critic noted, his breakthrough dot paintings placed him in line with “colour-field painting, minimalism and op art in one fell swoop”. His use of large, coloured monochrome backgrounds aligned him with the interests of colour-field painters; his systematic, grid-based compositions and his explicit aim to eliminate the artist’s hand reverberated deeply with the ethos of minimalism; and the powerful, pulsating visual effects of his works placed him right at the centre of the op-art phenomenon. Poons was not just a participant in a movement; he was a juncture for several, which made his work feel urgent, essential and absolutely of its time.

Part II — Wunderkind and the grid: the origins of the dot paintings

Larry Poons’s arrival on the New York art scene was less of a gradual rise than a sudden, brilliant explosion. With his first solo exhibition at Richard Bellamy’s highly respected Green Gallery in 1963, he became, almost overnight, an “instant critical darling” and the most talked about painter of his generation. This swift rise to fame, while still in his twenties, was a significant indicator of the power of the work, since artists of his generation were usually expected to work for decades before receiving such attention. The works that secured his reputation were his now iconic “dot paintings”: brilliant, hypnotic canvases with mathematically arranged dots or ellipses that shimmer on a field of lively, monochrome colour.

A musical foundation

Crucially, Poons did not come to painting from a traditional academic art education. His basic education was in music. From 1955 to 1957, he studied theory and composition at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. His aim was to be a professional musician, a career he abandoned after a transformative encounter with an exhibition of Barnett Newman’s paintings in 1959, which inspired him to become a painter. His musical background was not just a biographical detail; it was fundamental to the conceptual structure of his early work.

The careful, systematic nature of the dot paintings can be considered a direct translation of musical principles to a visual language. The underlying grid acted as a staff and the carefully placed dots and ellipses as notes, which created visual rhythm, syncopation and a pulsating energy that many likened to musical tempos. His process was further influenced by the aleatorical, or chance-based, compositional methods of the avant-garde composer John Cage, whose ideas on discovering order in randomness provided an intellectual framework for Poons’s structured, but seemingly dynamic arrangements.

Process: music, mathematics and “non-manual” painting

The creation of a dot painting involved a very methodical, multi-stage process, which started, not at the easel, but on paper. Poons planned with precision the placement of each dot and ellipse on graph paper and designed the composition according to a predetermined, often complex, mathematical system. This methodical approach was a deliberate strategy to “eliminate the artist’s hand” from the compositional act. By establishing a set of rules that generated the painting, he could distance himself from subjective decision-making, a conceptual strategy he shared with his close friend and art colleague, Frank Stella. The painting process, as Poons described it, then became “more of a tail-end of what I was working on”, where all the creative energy was invested in the preparatory schematic designs.

However, this intellectual stringency disguised a surprising and deeply personal motivation. Poons has been open in admitting that the entire system of dots and grids arose from a deep “crisis of confidence”. He struggled to draw properly and was unhappy with his early attempts to paint shapes by hand. After a friend advised him to simplify his approach, he developed the dot system as a practical solution to a perceived personal failure. This reveals a fascinating paradox at the heart of his early success: the very method that placed him in line with the era’s most advanced artistic theories — minimalist systems, colour-field optics, op-art effects — was for the artist himself simply a pragmatic solution.

Critical acclaim

The art world, unaware or unconcerned by his private motives, embraced the work with great enthusiasm. The paintings, with their shimmering afterimages and pulsating colour fields, were perfectly suited to the growing interest in optical phenomena. This association was cemented in 1965, when his work featured prominently in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking exhibition, The Responsive Eye, which officially canonised op art as a major international movement. Further recognition came in 1969, when curator Henry Geldzahler selected Poons in his monumental overview at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970. At only 32 years of age, Poons was the youngest of the 43 artists included, a group comprised of the giants of American modernism. He was represented by “dazzling expanses of glowing colour punctuated by flickering dots and ovals”, which secured his status as a wunderkind and a key figure of his generation.

The connection between the external comprehension of Poons as a high-concept strategist and his internal experience of the dot paintings as a restrictive solution to a technical problem, is the crucial key to understanding his entire artistic trajectory. It established the central conflict that would propel his consequential, and most dramatic, artistic revolt. The market and the critics acclaimed the work he himself found boring and creatively unfulfilling. This paradox — the tension between a style that brought him fame and a personal artistic impulse that demanded something more direct, physical and intuitive — would soon force a radical change of direction.

Part III — The Castelli years: in the eye of the hurricane

In 1965, Larry Poons made a move that placed him at the absolute epicentre of the contemporary art world: he joined the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery. This was much more than the next step in his career; it was an introduction to the pantheon of the American avant-garde. Being represented by Castelli in the mid-1960s meant being a significant part of the era’s most important conversations about art. The gallery was a melting pot, a place where the seminal works of pop art, minimalism and post-painterly abstraction were presented in real-time, which created an atmosphere of intense dialogue, competition and cross-pollination.

Poons had solo shows at Castelli in January 1967 and November 1968, and participated in several influential group exhibitions, including the gallery’s “Tenth Anniversary Exhibition” in 1967 and a group show in 1965 together with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. His participation in the graphic portfolio “Ten from Leo Castelli” from 1967, along with artists such as Warhol, Judd, Stella and Rauschenberg, was a definite expression of his place among the gallery’s core group of revolutionaries.

These were not only his contemporaries; they were his equals and, in certain cases, dear friends. His friendship with Frank Stella was of particular importance; they shared a similar conceptual approach centred around systematic processes and the displacement of the artist’s hand, and their mutual respect ran deep.

As a clear sign of their appreciation, both Stella and the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris acquired early paintings by Poons for their personal collections. Simultaneously, Poons’s work conducted a rich dialogue with the colour-field painters he admired, such as Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland, whose own captivating abstractions advanced the expressive power of pure colour.

To fully comprehend the speed and intensity of this moment, it is useful to consider Poons’s presence at the gallery not as some isolated fact, but within the framework of its exhibition programme. The timeline reveals a constant rate of innovation, with one groundbreaking exhibition after another in rapid succession. Between Poons’s own solo shows in 1967 and 1968, Castelli presented major exhibitions by Robert Morris, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman and Jasper Johns. In 1969, the pace continued with large exhibitions by Donald Judd, James Rosenquist and again Stella and Nauman. This schedule transforms an abstract list of names into a tangible timeline of dialogue and influence. It reveals how within the same physical space, during a compressed period, pioneering work was introduced that would come to define the major movements of the late 20th century.

Poons was not on the periphery of this revolution; he was in the eye of the hurricane, where his calculated, optical paintings provided a crucial point of contrast and connectivity in the midst of pop art’s ironic appropriations, minimalism’s strict objectivity and the nascent experimentation of conceptual and process art. His time with Castelli cemented his status and placed his work at the very heart of the era’s defining debates about art.

Part IV — The great schism: from dots to throws

At the height of his fame, with his work acclaimed by critics, coveted by collectors and championed by the world’s most powerful gallery, Larry Poons made a decision that was as brave as it was, by the standards of the art market, foolish. He abandoned dot painting. This was no gradual retreat, but a giant and deliberate rupture, a philosophical rebellion against the very qualities that had made him a star. He turned his back on the grid’s sharp, optical precision and threw himself head-first into paint’s messy, unpredictable and raw materiality. This transformation would drive away critics, bewilder dealers and redefine his artistic identity for the next five decades.

Rupture with Greenberg

The catalyst of this schism was his growing displeasure with the era’s dominant critical voice, Clement Greenberg. Initially, Poons’s dot paintings suited Greenberg’s taste, since their flatness and emphasis on pure optics accommodated perfectly the critic’s formalist theories on “Post-Painterly Abstraction”.

However, Poons felt limited by such theories. He began rebelling against what he considered “the dogma of flatness” and came to believe that the true “essential nature of painting” was not in its two dimensionality, but in the paint’s physical, tactile materiality. The rift went public in 1964, when Poons declined Greenberg’s invitation to participate in the trailblazing exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, apparently over a disagreement about the size of the works to be included. It was a clear sign of his growing independence, and the final breach with Greenberg’s circle occurred around 1966.

The consequences were immediate. When he started moving towards a more painterly, textured style, “he offended Greenberg, turned off buyers and scared away dealers”. Even his friend Frank Stella, although supportive, recognised the courage of the move by leaving a note of congratulations for Poons at the gallery, a gesture that acknowledged the risk involved.

Birth of the “throw paintings”

By the late 1960s, work on the dots and ellipses had gradually dwindled, and by the early 1970s had stopped completely. Poons began a radical new work process. He placed his canvases upright and started to pour, drop and throw, often from a height, buckets of thinned acrylic paint, and let it run down the surface in thick, intersecting streams. This was an intensely physical, athletic process. He abandoned the brush completely and did not use it again until the 1990s, instead employing as his primary tools his hands, gravity and the paint’s inherent properties.

An anecdote that Poons himself has repeated gives a fascinating insight into how he arrived at this technique. He recalls Greenberg visiting his studio and, pointing at an accidental splat of paint, simply remarked: “Look at that.” For Poons, it was a revelation. At that moment, he realised that by throwing paint at a vertical surface, he could attain a level of complexity and “drawing” that was both exciting and liberating. This new method, which utilised chance and the laws of gravity, became his way to compose “without leaving traces of the artist’s hand” — an aim that, paradoxically enough, was shared by his earlier, more controlled work. He could control certain variables — the density and volume of paint, the sequence and placement of colours, the energy and the angle of the throw — but the end result was a collaboration with physics, a “gravity’s rainbow”.

“Elephant skin” and materiality

The results of this process were astonishing. The canvases grew thick, heavy and deeply textured, with creviced topographies that critic Michael Fried memorably called “elephant skin paintings”. Fried described these surfaces as “very aggressive” and they worked “as a barrier, like some impenetrable bark, leprous skin or lava flow”. This was art with an overwhelming physicality, in sharp contrast to the ethereal optics of his early works. To further emphasise this new focus on materiality, Poons began to fasten diverse objects to the canvas before applying the paint: bits of foam, rubber, rope and even typewriting paper — which created complex reliefs that stuck out dramatically from the wall and pushed these works into territory between painting and sculpture.

This dramatic pivot away from dots to throws is often considered a contradiction, but it is more correctly understood as a deepening of the same fundamental artistic exploration. His entire career has been a search for a method to generate complex visual fields that are not dependent on his own subjective, gestural “hand”. The dot paintings achieved this through an intellectual system of control before the material act. The throw paintings achieved it through a physical system of controlled chaos during the act of painting. He quite simply replaced one set of tools — mathematics and the grid — with another — gravity and the bucket. The great breach was therefore not a repudiation of his past, but a radical redeployment of its underlying premise. It revealed an artist who was willing to risk everything — fame, fortune, critical approval — in order to deepen his study of the essential matter of how a painting can be created, and demonstrated his commitment to the process of discovery and not to the convenience of a successful formula.

Conclusion: the unfolding canvas

To follow Larry Poons’s career arc is to witness a masterclass in artistic integrity. His journey from the disciplined, optical shimmer of the 1960s to the sublime, material torrents of the 1970s, was not a rejection of his past, but a profound and necessary evolution. Through these seismic shifts, several core principles remained steadfast: a lifelong, almost spiritual, devotion to colour; a relentless enquiry into the physical characteristics of paint; and an absolute, uncompromising commitment to risk and reinvention. “Painting is colour!” he often proclaims, a simple statement that encapsulates the driving force behind six decades of work.

These contemporary paintings on show at Wetterling Gallery are the culmination of this epic journey. They are not a simple return to tradition, but a magnificent synthesis of everything Poons has learned. When he returned to the brush in the 1990s, he did so with a freedom won from decades of not using it. The bravura brushwork, the complex, layer-upon-layer surfaces and the impossibly nuanced interactions of colour in his latest canvases are informed by the mathematical precision of the dots, the gravitational pull of the throws and the robust topography of the elephant skins. We see the legacy of the grid in the underlying structure that holds these compositions together, and we recognise the memory of the thrown paint in the dynamic energy that seems to flow over their surfaces.

This exhibition in Sweden is therefore much more than a look at the latest work of an art-historical master. It provides an encounter with a profoundly contemporary artist whose entire history lives in every mark he makes. These canvases are not static objects, but developing events, testament to a restless, rebellious energy that has never gone away. Larry Poons is not a figure locked in the past; he is a painter whose continual act of becoming redefines the possibilities of the medium. The work on show is the latest, vital chapter of a life of relentless exploration, which proves that for a true artist, the most exciting painting is always the one that comes next.

— Edvard Thordén

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Larry Poons — biography

Born in 1937 in Tokyo, Japan, American painter Larry Poons initially pursued a career in music. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston from 1955 to 1959, but following a visit to a Barnett Newman exhibition at French & Company in New York City in 1959, he changed course and instead began his pursuit of the visual arts. He subsequently enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After completing his studies there, he moved to New York to devote himself full time to artistic practice.

Poons held his first solo show in 1963 at Richard Bellamy’s celebrated Green Gallery, and two years later his work was included in the influential exhibition The Responsive Eye, held at the Museum of Modern Art. Poons’s early work from the 1960s was decidedly “optical” in the viewpoint set out by the MoMA show. Composing his paintings according to a mathematically determined series of points and carefully chosen colour schemes, Poons was able to eliminate the “hand of the artist”, an artistic strategy also being pursued at the time by his close friend Frank Stella.

Eventually Poons came to feel that the purely optical approach to making art was restricting, and in the late 1970s he began to work by pouring and throwing paint on the canvas — again in an attempt to compose a painting without leaving traces of the artist’s hand. It was also during this period that he began attaching miscellaneous materials to the canvas — foam balls, for example, or rope. In the 1990s, Poons returned to using a paintbrush, working on rolls of canvas unfurled across the four walls of his studio, so that he could immerse himself in the work as he made it. At the end of this process, he would painstakingly crop out individual paintings from the massive length of each roll.

Nowadays, Poons splits his time between studios in New York City and East Durham, New York. His work continues to be shown widely and most recently was included in the international traveling exhibition Painting after Postmodernism, Belgium—USA (2016–18), curated by Barbara Rose. In 2018, Poons was featured in the HBO documentary The Price of Everything: An Art World Odyssey, directed by Nathaniel Kahn. His tireless and inimitable trajectory of artistic experimentation has made his work sought after by both private collectors and institutions, and is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Selected public collections

• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
• Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH
• Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
• Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL
• Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
• Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
• Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI
• Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO
• David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI
• Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
• Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA
• Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
• Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN
• Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
• The Kreeger Museum, Washington, DC
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
• McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
• Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
• Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
• Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria
• Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Quebec, Canada
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
• Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA
• Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI
• Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
• Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA
• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
• Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Saint Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO
• Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom
• Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT
• Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Biographical note and collections list reproduced from the exhibition catalogue, Larry Poons: Creations of Sound (Wetterling Gallery, 2025).