Abstraction and Color Field painting Walter Darby Bannard

Walter Darby Bannard (September 23, 1934 – October 2, 2016) was an American abstract painter.Bannard was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Phillips Exeter Academy (class of 1952) and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, who was also interested in minimalist abstraction. He was associated with Modernism, Lyrical Abstraction, Minimalism, Formalism (art), Post-painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting.Bannard’s first solo show was at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in January, 1965 and he had exhibitions there until 1970. He began showing at the Lawrence Rubin Gallery, and then in 1974 at the Knoedler Contemporary Gallery, where he showed for the next 15 years. Currently he shows at the Loretta Howard Gallery and the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City, the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles and the Center for Visual Communication in Miami, Florida. He has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries nationally and internationally. In Europe, he is exclusively represented by Roberto Polo Gallery in Brussels. Bannard's last solo exhibition was within the context of Painting After Postmodernism | Belgium - USA, curated by Barbara Rose, and organised by Roberto Polo Gallery in collaboration with the city of Brussels. This venue opened at the historic Vanderborght building in Brussels on September 14th, 2016. Bannard had close to a hundred solo exhibitions, was included in several hundred group shows, and is represented in the collections of all the major New York museums and many others around the world. He was a prolific writer on art with over a hundred published essays and reviews; Bannard has taught, lectured and participated in panel discussions, and has been a Co-chair of the International Exhibitions Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts.Bannard's paintings from 1959 to 1965 contained few forms, as little as a single band painted around a field of color, and then developed into somewhat more complex geometric forms by the mid-1960s. The critic Phyllis Tuchman wrote about these works, "These colors are still radiant. And the artist’s pale palette is as uniquely personal today as it was fifty years ago. You can’t even apply a name to his hues."In the late 1960s the forms dissolved into pale, atmospheric fields of color applied with rollers and paint-soaked rags. He began using the new acrylic mediums in 1970 and his paintings evolved into colorful expanses of richly colored gels and polymers applied with squeegees and commercial floor brooms.Wikipedia