Honor
Stanley Whitney
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Stanley Whitney was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2017. Founded in 1898, the organization honors the country’s leading visual artists, architects, composers, and writers, and seeks to foster interest in literature, music, and art by administering awards, exhibiting work, funding performances, and purchasing artwork for donation to museums. Election into the American Academy of Arts and Letters is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States, and its members are elected for life.
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Photo: Miranda Leighfield
Related News
Auction
Artsy Spotlight Auction: Stanley Whitney
In Support of the Art for Justice Fund and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York
September 27–October 7, 2022
The Freedom We Fight For (2022), a new painting by Stanley Whitney, will be featured in a single-lot benefit auction hosted by Artsy, in partnership with Gagosian. All proceeds from the sale will support Art for Justice Fund and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York in their respective urgent fights for decarceration and criminal justice reform and reproductive rights in the United States. The artwork is viewable at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York, during the auction.
The eighty-inch-square oil-on-linen abstract painting underscores Whitney’s facility as a colorist. Pieced together from rectilinear fields of red, yellow, green, blue, orange, brown, black, and gray divided by horizontal bands of red, blue, and teal, its “stacked” composition, translucent layers of paint, and energetic brushwork effectively deconstruct the modernist grid. Whitney draws inspiration from Greek and Mediterranean ceramics and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern Roman architecture.
Stanley Whitney, The Freedom We Fight For, 2022 © Stanley Whitney
New Representation
Stanley Whitney
Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Stanley Whitney. Renowned for the depth of his exploration into the expressive potentials of painted color and form, Whitney has been committed to abstraction since the mid-1970s. While living in Rome in the 1990s, he consolidated a process-based painterly approach which he has now sustained and developed over the course of three decades.
Photo: Jeannette Montgomery Barron/Trunk Archive
Commission
Stanley Whitney
Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies
The Baltimore Museum of Art has commissioned Stanley Whitney to create a set of three large-scale stained-glass windows, titled Dance with Me Henri, for the new Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, an approximately 2,500-square-foot space on the first floor of the museum dedicated to the study of Henri Matisse, opening December 2021. Whitney has long been recognized for his vibrant explorations of color and light within the painterly structures of the grid and has often cited historic European painting—including the work of Matisse and, in particular, Matisse’s glass windows for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in southern France—as a source of inspiration for his formal investigations. To create the panels, Whitney is working with Franz Mayer of Munich, one of the world’s oldest and most celebrated artist glass studios.
Stanley Whitney’s installation Dance with Me Henri (2021) at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Artwork © Stanley Whitney
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2024
The Spring 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available with a fresh cover design featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lead Plate with Hole (1984).
Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson
Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.
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.
Francesca Woodman
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Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.
Black Futurity: Lessons in (Art) History to Forge a Path Forward
Jon Copes asks, What can Black History Month mean in the year 2024? He looks to a selection of scholars and artists for the answer.
Kelsey Lu
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The Art of Biography: Mary Gabriel and Carol Kino
Carol Kino’s forthcoming biography of Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe, the identical twin sisters who blazed new trails in the world of photography—Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines—charts a critical moment in the United States, bringing to the surface questions around aesthetics, technologies, and gender through the arc of the twins’ lives. Here, Kino meets with award-winning biographer Mary Gabriel, whose 2023 publication Madonna: A Rebel Life described the unparalleled significance of the musician’s life and career, to discuss the origins of their most recent projects, as well as the specific considerations that underpin the process of narrating a life.
Douglas Gordon: To Sing
On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.
Simon Hantaï: Azzurro Blue
In conjunction with Azzurro, an exhibition of paintings by Simon Hantaï at Gagosian, Rome, we share the catalogue essay by curator Anne Baldassari. Here Baldassari focuses on the significance of blue in the artist’s practice, illuminating his affinity with Italy and the influence on his work of its classical painting tradition.
The Beginning: A Life in Art
Delphine Huisinga and Alison McDonald chart Larry Gagosian’s formative years on the West Coast and contextualize the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1970s.