Born 1924, Asheville, North Carolina, USA
Kenneth Noland’s groundbreaking explorations of form, medium and scale have influenced artists internationally since the 1960s. A key artist among a generation of painters who reacted against the highly personal and ‘painterly’ approach of the then dominant form of Abstract Expressionism, Kenneth Noland’s work typifies the so-called ‘post painterly abstraction’ of the 1960s: a reduced formal vocabulary of simple, often geometric compositions executed in a characteristically detached manner, which was a forerunner of Minimalism.
Kenneth Noland has always worked in series, creating paintings which explore regular schematic compositions or motifs in different combinations of colour – circles (1958-62), chevrons (1962-4), diamonds (1964-7). Beginning in 1966, Kenneth Noland made a series of paintings composed entirely from horizontal stripes of pure colour. The ‘stripe paintings’, like his earlier works, employ simple form as a device to provide ready-made structures for his paintings and to concentrate the effect of colour, his primary concern.
In the early 1970s Kenneth Noland introduced a grid structure into his paintings creating works reminiscent of Mondrian but with a matrix of coloured lines. From the late 1970s and into the early 1980s he began working with irregularly shaped canvases covered by geometric areas of restrained colour, although he later returned to regular canvases and to some of his earlier chevron designs. Colour remained his prime concern, with shapes employed simply as its vehicle.
Source: Tate and MoMA NewYork