About
I follow the paintings wherever they take me. If the painting goes out the door, I follow it out the door; if it goes out the window, I follow it out the window.
—Stanley Whitney
“I start at the top and work down,” explains Stanley Whitney. “That gets into call-and-response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way round.” Whitney’s vibrant abstract paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid, imbuing it with new and unexpected cadences of color, rhythm, and space. Deriving inspiration from sources as diverse as Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, and American quilt-making, Whitney composes with blocks and bars that articulate a chromatic call-and-response in each canvas. He has spent many years experimenting with the seemingly limitless potential of a single compositional method, loosely dividing square canvases into multiple registers. The thinly applied oil paint retains his active brushwork and allows for a degree of transparency and tension at the overlapping borders between each rectilinear parcel of vivid color. In varying canvas sizes, he explores the shifting effects of his freehand geometries at both intimate and grand scales as he deftly lays down successive blocks of paint, heeding the call of each color. Experimental jazz—Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman—is Whitney’s soundtrack, its defining improvisational method yielding ever new energies to his process of painting.
Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in 1968. He graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1972, but found himself at odds with the politically and theoretically oriented contemporary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, confronting the expectation that an African American artist should contend directly with themes of racial and cultural identity. Whitney was more interested in honing an abstract visual language, his early works incorporating patches of color surrounded by areas of empty space. At this stage in his career he was also focused on the power of gesture and immersed in the daily practice of drawing.
Although Whitney has been deeply invested in chromatic experimentation throughout his career, he consolidated his distinctive approach during a period spent living and working in Rome in the 1990s, shifting his compositions from untethered amorphous forms to the denser stacked arrangements that characterize his mature style. It was Roman art and architecture—including the imposing façades of the Colosseum and the Palazzo Farnese and the stacked shelves of funerary urns on display at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco—that informed his nuanced understanding of the relationship between color and geometry. Italy remains a central and enduring source of inspiration for Whitney, who spends his summers painting at his studio near Parma.
Photo: Jeannette Montgomery Barron/Trunk Archive
#StanleyWhitney
Exhibitions
Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day
Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.
Book Corner
Private Pages Made Public
Megan N. Liberty explores artists’ engagement with notebooks and diaries, thinking through the various meanings that arise when these private ledgers become public.
The Space Is in the Color: Stanley Whitney
Stanley Whitney reflects on the evolution of his work with Louise Neri, from his formative early days in New York to the pivotal period he spent living and working in Rome, arriving at the highly distinctive paintings for which he is now known. They explore the diverse and surprising influences of art and music on Whitney’s oeuvre, as well as his process and practice.
Stanley Whitney: Rhythm and Vision
While preparing his first exhibition with Gagosian, in Rome, Stanley Whitney speaks with Louise Neri in his New York studio about how he arrived at his unique and intuitive approach to color and space in painting, employing a dynamic fusion of preordained structure and improvisation.
Stanley Whitney: The Ruins
For American painter Stanley Whitney, Italy remains a central and enduring source of inspiration. Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, the author of a new monograph on the artist, reflects on the profound and far-reaching influence of Italian art and architecture on Whitney’s art.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
ART SG 2024
January 19–21, 2024, booth BC06
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
artsg.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the second edition of ART SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Amoako Boafo, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Nan Goldin, Lauren Halsey, Hao Liang, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Donald Judd, Y.Z. Kami, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami & Virgil Abloh, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi. The works on view, which embrace a wide variety of subjects and approaches, find artists infusing traditional genres such as history painting, portraiture, and landscape with new and surprising ideas that traverse cultural and temporal boundaries.
Gagosian’s booth at ART SG 2024. Artwork, left to right: © ADAGP, Paris, 2024, © Jonas Wood, © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Auction
The Art of Wishes 2023
Monday, October 9, 2023
Raffles Hotel, London
www.artofwishes.org.uk
Founded by philanthropist and Make‐A‐Wish patron Batia Ofer, the Art of Wishes is a charitable initiative that brings the international art community together to raise funds for Make-A-Wish UK, a nonprofit organization that grants the wishes of children with critical illnesses. The sixth annual Art of Wishes benefit auction and gala will take place at Raffles Hotel in London. The auction will be hosted on Artsy, with a preview of the artworks open to the public from October 4 through 7 at Christie’s London. Twelve works by leading international artists such as Edmund de Waal, Jadé Fadojutimi, Albert Oehlen, Stanley Whitney, and others will be included.
Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2022 © Albert Oehlen
Art Fair
Frieze Seoul 2023
September 7–9, 2023, booth C14
COEX, Seoul
www.frieze.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Frieze Seoul 2023 with a presentation of contemporary works by gallery artists, including Derrick Adams, Georg Baselitz, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Jadé Fadojutimi, Urs Fischer, Cy Gavin, Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Jennifer Guidi, Thomas Houseago, Alex Israel, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Ruscha, Alexandria Smith, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Richard Wright, among others.
Coinciding with the fair is the arrival of Jiyoung Lee, who was recently appointed to lead the gallery’s operations in Korea. Lee joins Gagosian following nearly fifteen years based in Seoul working on behalf of both Korean and Western galleries. Her appointment builds on the gallery’s establishment of a business entity in Korea last year, and provides for expanded activities in the region.
Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Seoul 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Jadé Fadojutimi, © Jen Guidi, © Alexandria Smith, © Mehdi Ghadyanloo, © Rick Lowe Studio, © Jonas Wood. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Stanley Whitney
How High the Moon
Through May 26, 2024
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York
buffaloakg.org
Conveying the breadth of Stanley Whitney’s practice from the early 1970s through today, this exhibition of artist’s paintings at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), also includes a robust installation of drawings, prints, and sketchbooks. The retrospective contextualizes Whitney’s practice in relation to his artistic community as well as his influences—from the history of art and architecture to quilting, textiles, and jazz.
Installation view, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York, February 9–May 26, 2024. Artwork © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Closed
No Justice without Love
April 4–June 30, 2023
Ford Foundation Gallery, New York
www.fordfoundation.org
No Justice without Love brings together the transformational work of artists, activists, and allied donors who make up the Art for Justice Fund community. The exhibition is an invitation to engage with the Fund’s mission to change the narrative around mass incarceration and disrupt the criminal justice system. In charting the evolution of artists’ practices, the works on show point to the ways in which artists and advocates create new aesthetics around humanity, resilience, and self-determination, while elevating themes of redemption, rehabilitation, and transformation. Work by Titus Kaphar and Stanley Whitney is included.
Installation view, No Justice without Love, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, April 4–June 30, 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Stanley Whitney, © Sherrill Roland. Photo: Sebastian Bach
Closed
X
A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022
January 27–May 26, 2023
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
sheldonartmuseum.org
X: A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022 is a survey of artworks acquired for the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection over the past decade. The chosen works demonstrate the breadth of collecting efforts and are a modest representation of the approximately 1,875 pieces that have entered the museum’s holdings since 2012. The exhibition seeks to present a snapshot of how the collection continues to evolve. Work by Richard Avedon, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Andy Warhol, and Stanley Whitney is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Big Bertha, 2015 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Closed
Stanley Whitney
Dance with Me Henri
November 20, 2022–April 23, 2023
Baltimore Museum of Art
artbma.org
This exhibition highlights Stanley Whitney’s recently commissioned stained-glass windows in the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies. Whitney selected a group of works on paper by Henri Matisse, to show in dialogue with sketches for the windows and his own prints, unfolding the relationship between the two artists and their experiments with line and color.
Installation view, Stanley Whitney: Dance with Me Henri, Baltimore Museum of Art, November 11, 2022–April 23, 2023. Artwork © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Mitro Hood