NYAB Event - Larry Zox "Paintings"

Larry Zox "Paintings"

Stephen Haller Gallery

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LARRY ZOX: PAINTINGS includes key paintings from the late artist’s personal collection, including rare works from the Round Centers and Loops Series.

Represented in nearly every major museum in the country, Larry Zox achieved art world prominence in 1973 as the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Zox’s signature style – the splicing of a color field to give the sensation of shifting planes was pivotal in his early collage paintings, and evolved into the graceful looping patterns of his later work. The paintings on view in this exhibition reveal the individualism and brio that are the hallmarks of Zox’s contribution to American art.

Arriving in New York as a young man, Zox quickly emerged as a talented master of painting and a gifted colorist. Those were the heady days of the 60’s and 70’s when artists from across the arts jostled one another in the bawdy, boozy, smoky atmosphere of art bars such as Max’s Kansas City. Zox distinguished himself among artists who sought to analyze painting as a thing in itself and to experiment with the reductive purity of color, line, and form.

In its heyday, Zox’s studio on 20th Street was known as a colorful gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. His love of jazz may have influenced his work. Critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote of Zox’s early paintings in the New York Times: “the result of such lavish, daring execution, within straightened circumstances, is a feeling of improvisation and fortuitous balance something like that of jazz. Maybe Mondrian, in attempting ‘Broadway Boogie-Woogie,’ was dreaming of Zox.”

In 2005 the exhibition Larry Zox: Five Decades at Stephen Haller Gallery returned Zox’s name to prominence. New York Times art critic Grace Glueck hailed the exhibition as “a welcome return for Mr. Zox.” Art in America’s Edward Leffingwell wrote of his early work in the show: “Zox’s geometric abstractions of the 1960’s are as probing and engaging today as they ever were.” Of his 2006 exhibition New York Sun critic John Goodrich wrote: “the painting brims with arguments about symmetry and its violations." There is a sense of energy, freshness, vitality in the work that is palpable. Distinguished art critic Peter Schjeldahl characterized this quality as Zox’s “exuberant sensibility.”

[Image: Larry Zox "Yours and Mine" (1993) acrylic on canvas, 72 x 76 in.]