Background
Larry Zox was born on March 31, 1937, in Des Moines, Iowa to Oscar and Mildred (née Friedman) Zox, but moved to New York City at an early age.
University of Oklahoma
Drake University
Des Moines Art Center
Larry Zox was born on March 31, 1937, in Des Moines, Iowa to Oscar and Mildred (née Friedman) Zox, but moved to New York City at an early age.
Larry attended the University of Oklahoma in 1956 and Drake University in 1957, and then studied under George Grosz at the Des Moines Art Center that same year.
In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. He occasionally sparred with visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, a former black smithy used previously by Jackson Pollock.
Zox’s earliest works were collages consisting of pieces of painted paper stapled onto sheets of plywood. He then produced paintings that were illusions of collages, including both torn- and trued-edged forms, to which he added a wide range of strong hues that created ambiguous surfaces. Next, he omitted the collage aspect of his work and applied flat color areas to create more complete statements of pure color and shape. He then replaced these torn and expressive edges with clean and impersonal lines that would define his work for the next decade.
From 1962 to 1965, he produced his Rotation series, at first creating plywood and Plexiglas reliefs, which turned squares into dynamic polygons. He used these shapes in his paintings as well, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces that suggest that the colored shapes had only been cut out and laid down instead of painted.
In 1965, he began the "Scissors Jack" series, in which he arranged opposing triangular shapes with inverted Vs of bare canvas at their centers that threaten to split their compositions apart. In several works from this series, Zox was inspired by ancient Chinese water vessels. With a mathematical precision and a poetic license, Zox flattened the three dimensional object onto graph paper, and later translated his interpretation of vessel’s lines onto canvas with masking tape, forming the structure of the painting.
The "Diamond Cut" and "Diamond Drill" paintings followed. In these, he used regularized formats as a means of revealing how color can change our perception of shape. In a single work he often combined industrial epoxy paints with acrylic to set up tensions between colors that would not exist otherwise. His art of the period was equated with that of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland.
In the late 1960s, Zox’s paintings, such as in his "Gemini" series, became brushier; he often incorporated powdered mica into his paints to increase their visual effect. He explored a variety of new means of applying paint early in the following decade, including using squeegees and other large tools. With these means, he moved away from preconception, while introducing a drawing procedure in which the outside limits of a painting were determined by cutting or cropping the canvas.
Zox taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1967 – 1968, 1977, and 1980. He was artist in residence or guest artist at many universities such as Yale, Syracuse, Cornell, and Dartmouth. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and awards from the National Council of the Arts in 1969 and the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation in 1985. Throughout his career, Zox had annual solo shows in galleries in New York City and elsewhere.
In addition to the Whitney exhibition of 1973 – 1974, he had solo shows at the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (1970), the Akron Art Institute (1971), the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (1974), and the Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond, Virginia (1993). He participated in many notable museum and college gallery exhibitions at venues including the Whitney; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; the Palm Springs Desert Museum; the Guggenheim; the Charles H. MacNider Museum, Mason City, Iowa; the Des Moines Art Center; the Blanden Memorial Art Museum; and the Muscatine Art Center, Iowa.
In the mid-1970s, Zox created a series of paintings in which he explored lateral tensions, leaving the centers of his works blank. He continued to stretch Color Field limits in the 1980s, combining the detachment of paint staining with gestural brushwork balanced between intuition and intentionality. He created more fluid yet still rigorous paintings in the early 2000s that were receiving critical praise when he died in 2006 from cancer.
Zox is currently represented in over one hundred museum collections. In addition to the Hirshhorn, his work is included in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Neues Museum, Bremen, Germany; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
Geometric Composition
Untitled
White 7
Red Line I
Bonac
Untitled
Untitled
Line Rotation
Untitled
Caxambus
Odon I
Temple Swift (from the Diamond Drill series)
Fowey Light
Double Diamond
Diamond Cut Series
Open White (Center)
Yours and Mine
Untitled
Untitled (Mostly Mozart Festival)
Rotation II
Niagara Series
Banner
Niagara Series IV
Untitled
Untitled 8
Red Line II
Orange Time
Big Bang Series
Abstract with Blue and Black
Untitled
Alto Velto
Rotation I
Westbury
Batticaloa (from the Diamond Drill series)
Untitled
Untitled (Rotation Series)
Moro II
Untitled 6
Tikke (from the Diamond Cut Series)
Diagonal 4
Scissors Jack
Rotation B
Vina
Niagara Series
Green Composition
Untitled 9
Untitled 1
Larry Zox adhered to the artistic traditions of Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction.
Quotations: “Being contrary is the only way I can get at anything.”
On July 19, 1965 Larry married Jean Marilyn Glover. Then he was survived by his second wife, the former Virginia King, and his two children from his first marriage Alexander and Melinda.