In 1969 Larry Poons was the youngest artist included in the influential New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940–1970 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In that show, established painters, including Barnett Newman, were presented alongside younger artists, “deflectors” who the curator Henry Geldzhaler argued were “redirecting” the trajectory of art. Poons’s art at the time was based on the grid and on rule-based operations that removed the artist from the process of making the work. Soon after, he took a very different direction. In works such as Refugo, Poons luxuriated in the material properties of paint, throwing, pouring, dripping, and building it up all over the canvas.