STANLEY WHITNEY

Stanley Whitney has explored the dynamics of colour for over five decades, honing a signature format of stacked, multi-coloured shapes. Early in his career, Whitney featured space in between his marks, seeking a sense of airiness and light within separated zones of colour. Over time colours were stacked more intimately, creating a juxtaposition of limitless range and controlled borders. These current configurations were realized amid a move to Italy and visit to Egypt in the mid-1990s. Whitney studied the stratified sarcophagi in Rome’s Etruscan Museum and the relationship between each object on Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi’s canvases. It was the perceived humanity within ancient buildings and architecture, Whitney’s consideration of each brick and the order in which they were laid, that led the artist to tighten the structure of his paintings and empower the dialogue between each brick of colour to inform the next.

Stanley Whitney’s universal language of dynamic colour and improvisational style continues in the new paintings on view. The exhibition incorporates a group of the artist’s trademark square paintings with an arrangement that positions his profound relationship with colour on a new pictorial plane. The new series, titled ‘Monk & Munch’ after the American Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, translate Whitney’s sequences of colour onto a smaller rectangular format. TwentyTwenty, the work for which the exhibition is titled, demonstrates the artist’s passages of colour on a monumental scale. Within the conversation between every vibrant hue, the artist elicits a rhythmic structure, echoing a musician moving along their sheet music. Whitney’s enthusiasm for music and instinctive cadence is displayed in his execution and even in the titles of additional recent works, including Keep on talkin’ blues (2021) and Blue Note (2020).

TwentyTwenty follows recent presentations of Stanley Whitney’s early work from the 1990s at the gallery’s East Hampton location, and an online exhibition of a group of works on paper from Whitney’s ‘No to Prison Life’ series, organised in collaboration with Art for Justice Fund, an organisation founded by Agnes Gund to drive criminal justice reform.

For the Venice Biennale 2022, Stanley Whitney will open an exhibition at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, presented by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Co-curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Vincenzo de Bellis, Curator and Associate Director of Programs, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, the exhibition marks the first time that Whitney will present works that have exclusively been created in Italy—from early works dating to the pivotal years he spent in Rome, to paintings made during subsequent summers spent in his studio near Parma throughout the last three decades. Whitney’s work will be the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Buffalo AKG in Buffalo, NY, USA in 2023-24.

Commissioned by The Baltimore Museum of Art, Stanley Whitney will debut a set of three, large-scale stained-glass windows to be installed inside the new Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies at the museum. The BMA will unveil the installation and new 2,500-square foot space on December 12, 2021.