Kenneth Noland: From Center to Edge

Hunter Dunbar Projects is pleased to announce From Center to Edge, a survey exhibition of work by Kenneth Noland (1924–2010). The presentation brings together key works from across Noland’s career to trace the evolution of his engagement with color, structure, and pictorial space. The exhibition will be on view at Hunter Dunbar Projects’ Chelsea location from April 30th through June 6th.

Kenneth Noland was a central figure in postwar American abstraction and a leading voice of the Washington Color School. Born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1924, he studied at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s after serving in the U.S. Air Force. There, the teachings of Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky helped shape his disciplined approach to structure and his commitment to color as an independent subject. In 1953, a visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio proved pivotal, leading Noland to adopt and refine the soak-stain technique, through which thinned acrylic paint was poured directly onto unprimed canvas so that color became inseparable from the surface itself. Rejecting visible brushwork, Noland developed a mode of painting in which color, edge, and proportion work together to shape spatial tension.

Drawing on longstanding relationships with scholars and collectors closely connected to the artist, From Center to Edge traces the evolution of Noland’s engagement with color and form across more than four decades. Early works such as Chalice (1959) introduce his use of concentric form, while paintings like Blue Plus Eight (1964) expand that language into chevrons, diamonds, and horizontal bands. In later works such as Slants (1976), Noland moved beyond the square canvas into structurally inventive formats, where the shape of the canvas becomes part of the image itself. By the final decades of his career, paintings including Mysteries: Costa del Sol (2001) reflect the continued clarity and freedom of his practice. Across these shifts, Noland developed a visual language in which color, edge, and scale work together to create a visual experience through structure. In this way, his work came to define what Clement Greenberg called “post-painterly abstraction,” and remains a major achievement in postwar American painting.

From Center to Edge will mark the first survey of Noland’s work at a gallery in Chelsea since 2011. Noland represented the United States at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and a major retrospective was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1977. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.