Kenneth Noland : New Circles
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
3 October - 5 November 2001
This exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is Kenneth Noland’s first in London for 20 years and gives us a opportunity to look again at the career of this important artist.
Kenneth Noland is a major figure in American abstract painting. After visiting Helen Frankenthaler with Clement Greenberg in the late 50s he and Morris Louis developed the method of staining bare canvas with pure colour. This development gave permission for minimalism to take shape. The early paintings were concentric circles of different colours usually with a painterly flare on the outer edge. Subsequently Kenneth Noland used massively extended rectangles, chevrons flared shapes and surfboard shapes. Concerned with making apparent the fact of the painting itself without outside references he used symmetrical compositions where the shapes on the canvas echoed or were referential to the shape of the canvas.
For these new paintings Kenneth Noland has returned to a format which he first used in the late 50s, the circle in the square. These New Circles are, however, different to the earlier ones, the surface slickly painted, the colours vibrant but synthetic. They seem almost high-tech and forbidding in contrast to the inviting matte surfaces and warm colour of the earlier work. In some cases metallic paint is used in others a dichromatic paint giving the paintings an optical effect.
Now in his 70’s Kenneth Noland has continued to be influential to generations of younger artists from Frank Stella to the artist/critic Matthew Collings. A revival of interest in colour field painting has resulted in a target painting by Kenneth Noland from the ‘60s selling at auction recently for nearly $800,000
In critic Karen Wilkin's words "it is neither an overstatement nor an over simplification to say that his recent Circle pictures are like a diary of everything Noland has discovered in his lifetime."
Kenneth Noland is represented in many major museum collections throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.
BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1S 4JX
