Ross + Co is pleased to be exhibiting a solo presentation of work by Larry Poons at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. The presentation brings together significant paintings spanning three distinct periods of Poons’s career after the mid-1970s, offering a focused look at the artist’s continual reinvention of gesture and material. On view will be two seminal “Throw” paintings, 32 A (1976) and Emi Koussi (1979), as well as two “Particle” paintings, Untitled (025D-5) (2001) and Casa de la Caritat (2002). These historic works will be exhibited alongside a selection of new paintings made within the past year.

Born in 1937 in Tokyo, the American painter initially trained as a musician, studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston from 1955 to 1959. A pivotal encounter with Barnett Newman’s exhibition at French & Company in New York in 1959 prompted Poons to shift his focus to the visual arts. He subsequently enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and, after completing his studies, relocated to New York to pursue painting full time.

Poons’s first solo exhibition took place in 1963 at Richard Bellamy’s influential Green Gallery. Two years later, his work was included in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, a landmark exhibition that helped define the “optical” tendencies of 1960s abstraction. In the 1960s, Poons achieved early critical acclaim with his “Dots” and “Lozenges” paintings—rigorously composed, hard-edge abstractions that propelled him to the forefront of American painting. In this early period, Poons composed his paintings through mathematically determined arrangements of points and precisely calibrated color systems—an approach aligned with contemporaries such as Frank Stella, with whom he maintained a close friendship. This method sought to suppress the visible “hand of the artist” in favor of a rigorously structured visual field.

By the late 1970s, however, Poons had grown restless with purely optical strategies. His process evolved into an experimental practice of pouring and throwing paint onto the canvas, again attempting to eliminate intentional mark-making while embracing the uncontrolled dynamics of material in motion. The works created during this period would come to be known as Poons’ “Throw” paintings. 

By the early 1990s, a markedly new aesthetic emerged in the form of the “Particle” paintings. In these works, Poons affixed bits and fragments—“particles”—of foam, rubber, polyester fiber, and other raw materials to the canvas. These protrusions disrupted and slowed the movement of paint, generating compositions that diverged sharply from the fluidity of the earlier “Throw” works.

In the mid-1990s, Poons began drawing lines and shapes directly onto raw canvas, establishing a loose scaffolding for each composition before building it up with particles and, later, with paint. As the particulate understructure grew more pronounced, it took on the role of a complex “under-drawing,” complicating the boundary between abstraction and representation. During this period, Poons gradually set aside the paint-throwing method, instead applying pigment directly with brushes, working on monumental rolls of canvas that unfurled across the walls of his studio. From these vast expanses, he meticulously cropped individual compositions, allowing paintings to emerge from the larger continuum of his gestures. Although fundamentally abstract, these compositions evoke expansive, imaginative worlds, offering subtle nods to landscapes, interior spaces, and a personal iconography that includes hints of musical notation—an enduring echo of Poons’s early aspirations as a composer.

Art Basel Miami Beach, held at the Miami Beach Convention Center (1901 Convention Ctr Dr, Miami Beach, FL 33139), will run December 3–December 7, 2025. Ross + Co will be located at booth C2. For more information or images, please contact info@rosscogallery.com.