Larry Poons in Conversation with Frank Stella + Book Signing

Larry Poons studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 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’ 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 color 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. Today, Poons splits his time between studios in New York City and East Durham, New York.

Frank Stella has produced an extraordinary body of work over the past six decades. Since his first solo gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, Stella has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. Early in his career, his work was included in a number of significant exhibitions that defined the art in the postwar era, including Sixteen Americans (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959), Geometric Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1962), The Shaped Canvas (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964-65), Systemic Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966), Documenta 4 (1968), and Structure of Color (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971). Stella’s recent work uses digital modeling to explore how subtle changes in scale, texture, color, and material can affect our perception and experience of an object.