Stanley Whitney

Gagosian is pleased to announce the exhibition of Stanley Whitney’s painting Dear Paris (2023) at 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, from January 10 to February 28, 2024.

Inspired by the artist’s extended stay in the French capital, Dear Paris is the latest of Whitney’s lyrical abstractions. Balancing systematic structure and expressive spontaneity, he composed the painting in his characteristic manner, one roughly rectilinear block at a time, starting at the top left and progressing in rows across and down the canvas. Whitney forms each shape with energetic brushwork, choosing its vivid hues and shaping its boundaries in relation to its predecessors. The painting’s subtly shifting freehand geometry is further demarcated by linear bands between its rows that both divide and unify the composition.

Pursuing abstraction since the 1970s, Whitney established his mature style in the 1990s while living and working in Rome. The compositional framework he employs allows him the freedom to improvise, facilitating the emergence of surprising chromatic harmonies and dynamic visual rhythms. The artist’s wide-ranging influences include the polyphonic call and response of jazz, the transformative effect of light cast on historic buildings, the traditions of American quiltmaking, and artists from Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian to Giorgio Morandi.