Larry Poons: “First Thoughts, Best Thought,” The Particle Paintings (1996–2002)

In a revelatory examination of Larry Poons’s seminal Particle paintings, this exhibition catalogue presents a critical reassessment of this pivotal yet understudied period in the artist’s oeuvre, wherein his radical departure from the hard-edge abstraction that defined his early career culminates in a complex synthesis of materiality and gesture. Following his internationally acclaimed Throw paintings of the 1970s and ’80s—works that interrogated the relationship between chance operations and artistic intentionality—Poons’s Particle paintings represent a sophisticated evolution in his practice, one that employs an innovative technique of affixing various industrial materials to the canvas surface to create deeply textured, quasi-sculptural terrains that simultaneously reference landscape, musical notation, and the artist’s own motorcycling adventures across the American West.

Published by Yares Art, New York, 2019

Essays by David Ebony and Alex Bacon

Designed by Tim Laun and Natalie Wedeking

Edited by SNAP Editions

Fully illustrated, 71 Pages

_{Cover Image © Larry Poons / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY}