Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York is presenting a focused survey of Kenneth Victor Young's early 'orb' paintings. The exhibition, 'Kenneth Victor Young: Works 1970-1972', is on view at the gallery's 394 Broadway space from 18 September through 31 October 2026, organized in collaboration with Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art. The show brings together paintings from a decisive two-year stretch in which Young developed his signature vocabulary: soft-edged, floating forms suspended in fields of color. Working on unstretched, unprimed canvas in the stain-painting manner associated with the Washington Color School, he allowed diluted acrylic to soak into the fibers. The resulting shapes hover between the microscopic and the cosmic, resembling cells under a lens or fragments of a planetary system. Young (1933-2017) arrived at painting by an unusual route. He studied physics and chemical engineering at the University of Louisville before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1964, where he knew Gene Davis, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. His studio was filled with jazz, whose rhythms shaped the repetition and improvisation of his technique, and he worked for more than three decades as an exhibition designer at the Smithsonian Institution, later teaching at the Corcoran School of Art and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The exhibition frames Young as a figure sidelined in early accounts of the Washington Color School, alongside Sam Gilliam, in part because of the racial politics of the civil-rights era. His work is held by the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Guggenheim and Pérez Art Museum Miami, yet this presentation argues that institutional holdings have not translated into full historical visibility. More than fifty years on, the orbs are positioned as a quiet rewriting of postwar American abstraction.