Coal

Details

Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)
Coal
signed, titled and dated '"COAL" Kenneth Noland © 1977' (on the reverse)
acrylic on shaped canvas
59½ x 85 3/8in. (151 x 217cm.)
Painted in 1977

Provenance

Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York, 1 October 1985, lot 67.
Waddington Galleries, London.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York, 15 November 2000, lot 374.
Gallerei S.E., Bergen.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Exhibited

Bergen, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Nymontering av samlingeni Lysverket, 2008.

Special notice

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Amanda Lo Iacono

aloiacono@christies.com +44 (0)20 7389 5207

Lot Essay

'It’s been on my mind – what would something be like if it were unbalanced? It’s been a vexing question for a long time. But it took the experience of working with radical kinds of symmetry, not just a rectangle, but a diamond shape, as well as extreme extensions of shapes, before I finally came to the idea of everything being unbalanced, nothing vertical, nothing horizontal, nothing parallel. I came to the fact that unbalancing has its own order. In a peculiar way, it can still end up feeling symmetrical. I don’t know but what the very nature of our response to art is experienced symmetrically'
(K. Noland, quoted in D. Waldman, ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art’, in Art in America, vol. 65, no. 3, May–June 1977, pp. 99–105).

Coal

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Lot Essay

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