Larry Zox

Following the cancellation of the Brooklyn Heights house tour because the age of ubiquitous social media made homeowners uneasy, the Brooklyn Heights Association is presenting Showhouse at 32 Livingston Street from 11 am – 5 pm every day except Monday through November 5. Last entry is at 4 pm. Showhouse features the work of more than a dozen designers, along with products for the home, wallpaper, furniture, and fixtures, many of them created right here in the borough.

It’s hard to categorize Larry Zox’s painting, though many have tried. In 1965, his work appeared in the exhibition “Shape and Structure,” organized by Frank Stella and Henry Geldzahler, which positioned the artist’s work amid hard-edge Color Field painting and Minimalism. A year later, Lawrence Alloway included Zox’s art in the show “Systemic Painting,” implying the work is best understood as an example of repetition and systemization, then supposedly the new “in” thing. This exhibition at Berry Campbell, however, demonstrated that Zox’s work betrays these categories. The eighteen pieces displayed (four small works on paper, fourteen on canvas) don’t have the reductive look of Minimalism—their colors don’t form a uniform field—and their structures can’t be regarded as systems. The repetitions that occur in them tend to be limited, giving them an odd inconclusiveness, and with that a peculiarly absurd, irksome quality. 

On the occasion of the current Larry Zox exhibition at Berry Campbell gallery in New York City, closing May 26, 2017, the artist's son Alexander Zox submitted this personal essay about his father and his family’s relationship to East Hampton and the East End of Long Island.

Pedestrians walking by Berry Campbell, site of a new exhibition dedicated to Larry Zox (1937-2006), all have the same reaction.

“You look through the window, and it’s like, ‘Wow!’” says Christine A. Berry, co-owner of the gallery on West 24th Street, in Chelsea. “You’re whacked in the face by bold reds, and next to that, you may see a soft seafoam green. It’s a very powerful show, with bold compositions and beautiful colors.”

The vibrant geometric paintings of Larry Zox from the 1960s employ strategies that continue to influence contemporary abstraction. A jazzy, muscular narrative fuels these works. Zox used diagonals to break up languid horizontal elements grounded in landscape.