Kenneth Noland

1969

Kenneth Noland’s oeuvre combines, in exemplary fashion, the European roots of Geometric Abstraction with the different orientations of the minimalist painting that has been emerging in America since around 1950. For the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, we acquired one extreme format of the Stripes, a kind of horizontal line in muted shades of beige and brown. Unlike the shaped canvases of other series at the time, the Stripes painted between 1967 and 1970 vary the landscape format but bring about an enigmatic charging of the picture through the classically pondered relationship of color quantity or color weight inherent in the picture and the external form of the picture. Noland’s Stripes respond to the human approach of perception, i.e. reading, as it were, the world from left to right in lines. The intensification of color continuity as a section of potentially infinite space dominates the simple factual nature of the picture as a radically reduced color body.