Kenneth Noland

Noland (born 1924) came of age in the 1950s, a decade that witnessed the triumph of American painting. In 1958, he embarked on a series of Circle paintings that established him as among the most important artists of his generation. In this major series, Noland pioneered his stain painting technique in which he saturated the canvas with the then-new acrylic paints that dried fast. Pigment and support became one, as Noland worked from the center of each canvas outward, varying bands of color and contrasting their warm and cool tones.

Noland´s Chevron series of the mid-1960s departs from the essentially target-like focus of the Circle paintings. With their asymmetrical compositions and strongly diagonal thrusts, the Chevron paintings test the limits of their frames. In this series Noland began to experiment with turning a painting on its edge and elongating it into the shape of a rhombus or a diamond. The next series, the Stripe paintings of the later 1960s, are considered Noland´s most conceptually evolved works because the stripes define the dimensions of the painting.

Works from the Plaid and Shaped Canvas series of the 1970s demonstrate how Noland challenged ideas of abstraction and decoration and eventually came to a new awareness of the painting itself as an object. In the Rough Chevrons of the 1980s, Noland revisits his earlier series, this time applying dense layers of paint to punctuate the tactile presence of each work.

Noland´s work from the 1990s is represented by paintings from three series: Doors, Flares, and Circles. In the latter series, the artist in effect comes full circle by reconsidering and transforming a format that emphasized the actual material of the canvas. Now, Noland builds up layers, like sculptural reliefs, supplementing the optical.

Pressetext

Kenneth Noland: The Nature of Color
Ort: Caroline Wiess Law Building