LARRY POONS: KENTUCKY COLS

ALMINE RECH Paris, Turenne is pleased to announce 'Kentucky Cols.', Larry Poons’ third solo exhibition with the gallery.

March 21 - May 21, 2026

This show, the artist’s first in Paris in nearly forty years, presents a series of new paintings, revealing the new directions in which Poons is taking his work.

Larry Poons, describes the strong impression made by a song he heard on the radio in the early 1950s: he compares this unusually intense experience to, smelling a flower for the first time. Looking at Poons’ recent paintings in this exhibition, viewers are seized by a similar sensation : not the representation of a flower, but the very experience of its opening and its blossoming. Ballroom Chassi, Pat Cloud, Clarence White, and How Many Hearts Have You Broken Today deploy imposing chromatic fields whose energy is less a matter of representation than of experience. Together, these works demonstrate Poons’ major role in the history of color-field painting.

A little over ten years after that decisive musical experience, Poons made his very first painting, Rock and Roll (1958), an abstract geometric work. The painter musician—who, starting in 1961, got together for informal musical sessions with his friends Walter de Maria, La Monte Young, and Jasper Johns—developed a style of optical abstraction, and his famous dot paintings are some of the first pictorial experimentations of Op art. It is therefore not surprising that he was one of the artists featured in “The Responsive Eye” at MoMA in 1965, with Nixe’s Mate (1961) from his series of Dot Paintings. This exhibition played a key role in the international recognition of Op art, while also counterbalancing the influence of this trend by showing work reflecting post-painterly abstraction and color field painting.

— Marjolaine Lévy, art historian and curator