KENNETH NOLAND: PAINTINGS 1966-2006
Pace is pleased to announce a two-part survey of work by American painter Kenneth Noland at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries.
January 10 - March 29, 2025
The gallery’s current survey of Noland’s work in Asia will present a full picture of his practice, featuring marquee paintings from his Stripe, Shape, Plaid, Chevron, Diamond, Flares, Doors, Mysteries, and Into the Cool series. The earliest paintings in the exhibition include Stripe and Diamond works he produced in the mid and late 1960s, when a new visual language emerged from his early Circles from the 1950s. These horizontally-oriented Stripe and Diamond paintings stretch across several meters beyond the viewer’s peripheral vision, evoking the feel of a vast, enveloping landscape.
Noland would use an array of techniques to apply bands of color in specific proportions—including staining the raw canvas or using a traditional paint roller—to create textural variation. With his use of acrylic paint, which cannot be reworked as easily as oil, Noland embraced the risk factor, quipping that he was a “one-shot painter.” Regardless of the technique he employed in his painting practice, Noland intentionally removed traces of his hand to focus attention on the materiality of the works while also allowing for chance reactions where bands of paint meet.
At the start of the 1970s, Noland began painting vertical stripes over his horizontal bands. The resulting works, his Plaid paintings, draw parallels with the paintings of Piet Mondrian, an early influence on Noland via his Black Mountain College teacher Ilya Bolotowsky, a proponent of the De Stijl philosophy. But unlike Mondrian, Noland retained the soft blur of stained canvas in his lines, cultivating a quasi-alchemical effect as colors overlap and knit together.
The latest works in the survey, dating to 2006, are from Noland’s Into the Cool series. These joyous compositions speak to the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and form, reflecting the artist’s enduring love of jazz in their jaunty, gestural abstractions. Though he returned to the image of the circle in his Into the Cool paintings, Noland approached color through subtle tone and transparency, moving away from the hard-edge style of his earlier work.