Ball was invited to hold a solo exhibition at the Westerly Gallery on West 56th Street , New York, and sold one painting to Australian landscape architect Bill Ashton. He received a favourable review from Thomas Newman and one brief review from Donald Judd. He participated in several group shows while at Westerly Gallery, including The New Edge, with Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Robert Huot and James Norman, all students of Robert Motherwell at Hunter College, City University of New York. He was also awarded a Ford Foundation scholarship. He showed the first of the Canto series using the vertical stripes contained within a circle. The distinctly geometric format of a circle within a square or rectangle explored the formal relationship between colour and symmetry. Ball stated that he ‘had been developing colour ideas and theories - the relationships of colour and investigations into spatial relationships - and became involved with the circle as a symbol of infinity’. The title of the series was inspired by Ezra Pound’s poems, The Cantos. Ball was introduced by Stamos to the other artists of the Irascible Eighteen group includes Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, and was invited to Mark Rothko’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. He travelled to Canada, visiting Gaspe Peninsular, Quebec, and Toronto before following the Hudson River dow to New York. He met Lee Krasner, saw Jackson Pollock’s studio and sold a Canto painting to the Aldrich Museum of Art, Connecticut (first museum sale).

Ball returned to Australia via Japan. He visited the Buddhist and Shinto shrines of Kyoto and Nara, beginning a long-lasting fascination and engagement with Asia. He was particularly interested in second and seventh century Buddhist art, especially the Wei-Jin and Han Dynasty works at Bingliza, the Tang and Song paintings and sculpture in the Mogoa caves at Dunhuang. In addition, his study of Chinese Mandarin and Korean languages enriched his appreciation of Eastern Art and philosophy. Before leaving New York, a show at the Museum of Modern Art Australia, Melbourne, was arranged with John Reed, who had suggested Elwyn Lynn see Ball’s work while on a study tour. Ball’s one man show ‘presented the local art audience with its first opportunity to view “hard-edge” abstraction as practised by an Australian artist’. The Reeds bought one Canto and a lithograph and another small Canto was purchased, yet the exhibition was not reviewed favourably. Ball, however, won the Mirror - Waratah invitation art prize with three New York Canto Paintings and was appointed Lecturer at the South Australian School of Art.

Ball’s first exhibition in Sydney, at Watters Gallery, received disparaging reviews; however, Elwyn Lynn and Patrick McCaughey were staunch supporters. He commenced his Persian series, which was influenced by his interest in Persian Art and architecture and resulted in a style based on the ‘ideals of colour, line and proportion’. Curvaceous lines generated balanced yet asymmetric forms of colour, opening up the surface and introducing a new sense of space.

Ball commenced the Modular series. Art critic Bryce James would later comment that these works had come to represent a time when ‘colourfield painting had passed into something at once more durable and more conceptual, almost becoming sculpture’. In the introduction to Engine at Farmers Blaxland Gallery in 1967, Kym Bonython stated that Ball, along with Col Jordon and Ken Reinhard, was a man of his time. ‘They are concerned with modern architecture, modern forms, modern synthetics. They blend the hard edge-statements of the modern designer with the warm sense of evangelism.’ Ball also won Special Prize, Perth Festival Exhibition, Perth.

In January 1970, Ball’s productive period was marred by a fire that destroyed his first New York studio, including all his canvases and materials. A second studio was subsequently lost over disagreements with the landlord. Ball met up with Clement Greenberg, having previously met him in Melbourne in 1968 for the judging of the Georges Invitation Art Prize. He was also introduced to Ken Noland, Jules Olitski and Jack Bush at a party hosted by Greenberg. Ball was greatly influenced by the American colourists, including Helen Frankenthaler from whom he learnt to value ‘the moment when the colour of the painting takes over’, as well as the ‘openness’ within works by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He travelled the east coast of America with Patrick McCaughey and Elwyn Lynn, discussing the growing loss of focus within world art. Following Mark Rothko’s tragic suicide, Marlborough Gerson asked him to clean the studio area where he had been assisting with the assembly of Rothko’s Menial chapel commission. He was also later asked to assist in hanging Rothko’s paintings in the chapel but was unable to do so owing to previous commitments.

Ball brought several of the Stain paintings back from New York and they formed part of a large sell-out exhibition at the Boynton Gallery, Sydney. Further successes eventuated following exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. Maintaining a focus on colour, the Stain paintings introduced an attention to the ‘surface tension between translucence and opacity’. Ball participated in the ABC-TV documentary Ten Australians, with an international tour of Paris, Stuttgart, Milan, Florence, Rome and Venice. He took up the position as Artist-in-Residence at the University of New England and was appointed Senior Lecturer in Art, City Art Institute, Sydney College of Advanced Education. He also travelled to the South Pacific Islands to look at Polynesian and Melanesian art and artefacts.

Ball was a panel member for the ‘Australian and European Imagination’ seminar at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Ball’s teaching skills helped establish links with Chinese artists and ‘led to opportunities to tour remote regions of India, China and Tibet, and the farmed sky burial grounds of the pre-Buddhist shaman sects in the Himalayas’. He also visited the shamans of South Korea. There is a cave full of Aboriginal art near his home from which he draws animalistic-shamanist connections with those through Asia. The Buddhist art and symbols of monasteries of Hille, Bung and Thangboche, as well as the Hindu and Jaim temples in New Delhi Agra and Jaipur, were of particular interest. He was Artist-in-Residence at the School of Art, Western Australian Institute of Technology, Perth.

In the new millennium, a resurgent interest in colour abstraction, both within Australia and internationally, saw a refocusing of academic and critical interest in Ball’s work. During this time he commenced two new series, Structures 1 and Structures 2, which investigated abstract architectural concepts. Here, Ball’s exploration of the work of architects Mies van der Rohe and Zaha Hadid, and their vision of form and structure, resulted in direct yet beautifully simple forms.

This led to critical museum surveys such as Australian Colour Field and Hard Edge Painting of the 1960s and 1970s, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2001; Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2003, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003; and 6 Years Abstraction, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Melbourne 2005.

Ball gifted over 30 of his works to the University of South Australia, Adelaide, in 2013. This prestigious gift, comprising over thirty important works and worth more than one million dollars, is by far the most valuable gift of Australian art ever made to the University. The Sydney Ball Gift are installed in the University’s Sir Eric Neal Library in February 2015, celebrating the artist’s long and impressive career and considerable impact on Australian art, and recognises this wonderful act of generosity to the University.

Left: Ceremony of installation of The Sydney Ball Gift at the University’s Sir Eric Neal Library, attended by ___________________________, ___________, ________________, _______________-. Images courtesy of the University of South Australia.

Ball’s last museum show of his lifetime, Superposition of three types, curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor and Talia Linz at Artspace, Sydney. Ball’s last work, Chromix Lumina #12 (2016), a large square composed of six pastel-coloured diagonal aluminium panels placed on the gallery floor, received high praise in Frieze Magazine: “Undoubtedly one of the best pieces in the exhibition, (…) a fitting end to his career, emanating the energy of a much younger artist.”

On 5 March 2017, Ball passed away after suffering a stroke two days before. His memorial service was held at the Art Gallery of NSW and was attended by hundreds of friends, family and supporters. Ball is survived by his partner, Lynne Eastaway.

In 2018, Ball was included in Superposition: Equilibrium and Engagement as part of the 21st Biennale of Sydney, curated by Mami Kataoka. His work, Black reveal (1968-69) is exhibited alongside his Modular sketches, a series of fourteen preparatory studies on paper. These were accompanied by three of Ball’s sketchbooks; the detailed pages providing further insight into the artist’s captivation with form, colour and light.

Most recently, Ball was included in the National Gallery of Victoria restaged its landmark exhibition, The Field for the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2018 as The Field Revisited.

Images on Left: Installation view of Superposition: Equilibrium and Engagement, part of 21st Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2018. Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In October 2018, his first posthumous solo exhibition, Infinex V, was presented at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney. The show had been planned during Ball’s lifetime to mark what would have been the artist’s 85th birthday. The Infinex V series was planned by Ball as a series of large-scale compositions. Fabricated by Urban Art Projects, the series has been realised according to the artist’s exacting instructions in automotive enamel on aluminium, a method of manufacturing he devised out of physical necessity at the age of 81 in 2014. As a way of honouring Ball’s working process, the exhibition presents both the finalised large-scale works on aluminium, a number of which have been realised posthumously, alongside a small series of intimate works on paper from 2013 which have never before been exhibited.

Images on Left: Installation views of Infinex V at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney, 2018