Acrylic on canvas
Signed, dated and titled as well as with an arrow indicating the direction on verso. 238 x 60,5 cm (93,7 x 23,8 in)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf (with label on verso).
Collection Helmut Klinker, Bochum (with label on verso).
Private collection South Germany.

EXHIBITION: Fünf Sammler - Kunst unserer Zeit, Von-der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, June 1971, cat. no. 87 (with illu.).
Collection Helmut Klinker. Malerei, Bildhauerei, Objekte und Graphik, Museum Bochum, 12 May - 01 July 1984, cat. no. 134 (with fullpage illu.).

Kenneth Noland counts among the main representatives of American Color Field Painting. He studied at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where a European geometric abstraction represented by Ilya Bolotowsky and the emigrated Bauhaus artist Joseph Albers was predominant. At the beginning of the 1950s, Noland closely examined the new gestural-abstract American painting, however, he soon attains another artistic expression, in which the fusion of color and image carrier also plays an important role. The young artist discovers the “staining technique“ in the studio of Helene Frankenthaler to be his favorite new technique. The color application is stil gestural in the series called “Targets“, a first large series of circle pictures on which the colors are arranged in circles with a varying breadth. The unprimed canvas is soaked with the thinned paint, the contours are blurred. Noland began working with a new mode of composition as of 1962, the angle motif, in which he arranges the colors in a system of V-shaped strips next to one another, which also formally enhances the color’s signaling effect. In connection with this series of “chevrons“, Noland finally began experimenting with the format, he puts the square canvas at an angle, so that the arrow structure is also represented in the image’s edges. The series of “shaped canvasses“ marks Noland’s final disengagement from the rectangular format, trying to emphasize the effect of his color stripes by means of broad or pointed rhombi, thus attempting to attain a consolidated combination of color and image carrier.

Noland pushes the rhomb together in this work from 1966, so that the image’s surface ends in an extremely acute angle at both ends. The canvas’s form, aggressively snatching into the room, backs up the dynamic color stripes across the picture. The work is merely composed of four color stripes in black, violet, cognac and azure next to one another. Devoid of any liaison to the object, color is used solely for the purpose of sensory perception, its immanent character is declared to be the subject. The eccentric violet and the transparent blue stand at the side of the matte black and the warm brown, thus accentuating the composition by sole means of their characters. Noland shows us the emancipation of colors, which he had always pursued, in an impressively consequent manner. "In painting it is important to me to find the right media to express the color without destroying it, in a way so that it keeps its value, regardless of supra-realistic, cubist or structural systems." (translation of quote after: Kritische Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, München 1994, p. 2).

In the late 1960’s Nolad made the first horizontally arranged stripe pictures, some of them up to seven meters wide. In the 1970s Noland developed his “shaped canvases”, which had by then only been rhombi-shaped, to asymmetric, multiangular formats and creates the series “Doors” in the 1980s, in which he finally combines canvases in extravagant formats with Plexiglas, thus creating objects that have materialized color, so that they can be finished and combined like sculptural material. Noland showed works at the documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968 and was honored with his first retrospective exhibition in the New York Guggenheim Museum as early as in 1977. [JS].