Larry Zox, who died Saturday at 69, was a New York artist whose abstract, color field paintings of the 1960s and 1970s attracted much admiration. His canvases are in the collections of museums throughout the country.

A New York Sun critic, writing in April, praised Zox’s “eye-catching, hard-edged abstractions” and said Zox’s style “brims with arguments about symmetry and its violations.”

A native of Iowa, Zox studied at the Des Moines Art Center with the German artist George Grosz, a figurative artist who nevertheless encouraged the young abstract painter. Zox then moved to New York and became part of the downtown art scene. By the mid-1960s, his large geometric paintings were appearing at prestigious galleries.

Zox maintained a studio on 20th Street that became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. A large man, Zox occasionally sparred with visiting fighters. Later, he had a studio in East Hampton, where he liked to fish and was even known to go fish spotting by helicopter.

In 1973, Zox’s work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A critic for the New York Times noted “several stunning successes” among his paintings, but a writer for the Christian Science Monitor complained that Zox’s work was derivative: “With the omnivorous appetite of a goat, he has devoured the major influences of the ’60s.”

The next year, in 1974, a Zox canvas was included in the opening exhibit of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. He later served artist in residence at Dartmouth, Yale, and other schools.

Zox’s career languished for a number of years after the lengthy illness of his first wife, Jean Glover, who died in 1987. By 2005, when he had his first New York solo show in more than two decades, his style had mellowed from the hard-edged geometry of the 1960s and 1970s. His lines had become more fluid and his surfaces more painterly, but his concern with color and shape remained unabated.

As ever, the paintings provoked sharply different reactions. “Larry Zox’s geometric abstractions of the 1960s are as probing and engaging today as they ever were,” a reviewer wrote in Art in America. But Artforum International was less kind, comparing the work to the interior décor of the 1970s: “Decades after its launch, the vanguard’s arrow plunges to earth, lodging in the wall over a rec room’s modular sofa, or behind a wet bar.”

Zox by then had moved his studio to Connecticut, remarried, and begun producing vivid art again. As the Sun’s critic observed of the April show, “His rigorous attack was always more than just a style, and his forms and colors still know what to do.”

A previously scheduled exhibit of his work opens January 20 at Stephen Haller Gallery in Manhattan.

Larry Zox

Born May 31, 1937, in Des Moines, Iowa; died December 16 in Connecticut of cancer; survived by his wife, Sha King Zox, his children, Melinda Zox, Alex Zox, and Eric Knapp, two grandchildren, a sister, and a brother.