Corkin Gallery is honoured to present new paintings by Larry Poons, one of the legendary artists of our era. A link to the heroic years of American abstraction, at 86 Poons continues to create paintings of astonishing vitality and mastery.

Born in Tokyo to an Anglo-American family, the young Larry Poons began to study music at the New England Conservatory, but soon jumped to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the early 60s, newly established in New York, he burst on the scene with characteristically large colour-field paintings of optical dazzle, and in the six decades since has produced a stream of unpredictable works of individual strength and quality.

Barbara Rose, in her monograph on the artist, has noted Poons' debt to precursors from Rubens to Newman, in his capacity to harness near-chaos with discipline and clarity. His recent work, from the easel-sized to the mural-scaled, conveys the luminosity and endless variety of nature without resorting to descriptiveness.

A natural heir to all the streams of American modernism, Larry Poons has created, in his late style, an art of wholeness, harmony and radiance. Indeed, age has not wearied him: a quarter-century older than his hero Beethoven, Poons is an avid motorcyclist who races vintage bikes even in his ninth decade. Larry Poons lives and works in New York City and upstate with his wife, artist Paula De Luccia

-Leopold Plotek