A founding member of the Washington Color School, Noland’s career can be largely defined by his tireless exploration of colour and form. The artist attended Black Mountain College, in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, intermittently from 1946 to 1950. While there he was exposed to some of the most influential artists of the time, ranging from Josef Albers to John Cage, and developed an early interest in the expressive potential of colour and chance. His mature style would come to render colour a resonant force and built a visual language that included chevrons, diamonds, circles, and horizontal bands. Often adhering to a compositional format, Noland would work methodically within a series to explore colour, material, and method.

For his Stripe paintings, Noland proportioned bands of colours in relation to the whole work and used various methods to apply paint, which resulted in a range of surface textures. These groupings of horizontal stripes utilise colour combinations to explore mood and light, often suggesting landscape imagery. Via Mojave (1968), on view in this presentation, features horizontal stripes of muted oranges, yellows, pinks, and blues. The colours, though separated into bands, flow together to create an image evocative of nature.

This exhibition builds on Noland’s presence in the Palm Beach area where the artist is part of permanent collections at the Pérez Art Museum and Vero Beach Museum.

Kenneth Noland (b. 1924, Asheville, North Carolina; d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine) attended Black Mountain College in the mid-1940s after serving in the US Air Force during World War II. There he learned about Neoplasticism, Bauhaus theories, and the work of Paul Klee, thus developing an early interest in the emotional effects of colour and geometric forms. In the 1950s, while living in Washington DC, Noland frequently travelled to New York to meet with Clement Greenberg, who introduced him to Abstract Expressionism as well as the stained paintings of Helen Frankenthaler. These encounters sparked an experimental period, during which Noland developed a new genre of abstraction known as Color Field. His exploration of line, colour, and shape unfolds across discrete series, from his ‘Circle’ and ‘Chevron’ paintings to his horizontal bands and shaped canvases. In 1977, a major travelling retrospective of the artist’s work was presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Memorial retrospectives of his work were presented in 2010 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.