Stanley Whitney

From June 3, as a preview of Stanley Whitney’s upcoming first exhibition with the gallery later this year, Gagosian Rome is presenting the Bertacca paintings, produced in the artist’s studio near Parma, Italy. These works are on view Monday to Friday, from 11am to 6pm.

Italian art and architecture became an enduring source of inspiration for Whitney when he lived and worked in Italy during the 1990s. The historical facades of the Colosseum and Palazzo Farnese, the stacked shelves of ancient funerary urns at the National Etruscan Museum, and the frescoes of Villa Boscoreale deepened his understanding of the nuanced relationship between structure and color. In 2017, Whitney titled a painting “Bertacca” after the small hamlet outside of Parma, in Emilia-Romagna, where his studio is located. Two years later, he painted Bertacca 1, 2, 3, and 4 as the beginning of an ongoing thread. Each Bertacca painting cites the rich shades of vermilion in the Boscoreale frescoes. The unknown Pompeiian artist’s use of color captured Whitney’s imagination as well as that of Giorgio Morandi, coincidentally from the same region as where Whitney maintains a studio. In Emilian cities like Parma, densely packed residential buildings create unusual color stories. Like Whitney’s bars of paint and Morandi’s forms defined by color rather than line, Parma’s saturated casette vary in proportion and their walls and window shutters parade the same dirty yellows, light pinks, and broken reds.