Ocula Report Havana Biennial 2019: Constructing the Possible 17 Apr 2019 : Federica Bueti for Ocula I first visited Havana in November 2016, a few days after Fidel Castro died, and just under a year before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba in September 2017. Since then, much has changed, including the hand-painted signs that punctuate the journey from the airport to the city centre, which today do not celebrate the revolution so much as the 'Unidad y...
Ocula Conversation Andrew Stahl and Guo Xiaohui The exhibition Beyond Boundaries at Somerset House in London (12 March–2 April 2019) marked the historic contributions of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on the occasion of their 100th and 150th anniversaries, respectively. Spread across several rooms of Somerset House's...
Ocula Report The National 2019: New Australian Art 13 Apr 2019 : Elyse Goldfinch for Ocula The National 2019: New Australian Art features work by 70 contemporary Australia-based artists split across three venues: the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (29 March–21 July 2019), as curated by Isobel Parker Philip, curator of photographs at AGNSW; Daniel Mudie Cunningham,...
Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2017) (detail). Monotype on handmade paper. 47 7/8 x 71 7/8 inches. Courtesy the artist and Two Palms, New York.
The one constant running through all of my writing on Whitney is his works on paper, which I am thinking about in the broadest sense—from the densely linear graphite concatenations he made in the late 1980s to the gouaches in fruity Popsicle colours from the past few years. It is clear to me that Whitney’s works on paper form a distinct body within his oeuvre, and that within this group he has gone down a number of different paths in his exploration of lines, grids, colours.
Artist Profile Stanley Whitney Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His current motif, honed over many years, is the stacked composition of numerous saturated colour fields, delineated by between three to five horizontal bands running the length of a square-formatted canvas. The cumulative effect of Whitney's multicoloured palette is not only one of masterly pictorial balance and a sense of continuum with other works in this ongoing series, but also that of fizzing, formal sensations caused by internal conflicts and resolutions within each painting. Taking his cues from early Minimalism, Color Field painters jazz music and his favourite historical artists - Titian, Velázquez and Cézanne among them - Whitney is as much an exponent of the process-based, spatially-gridded square in art as Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre.
Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute as well as an MFA from Yale University and is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Whitney's works featured in a major solo exhibition Dance the Orange, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA, 2015, and he has been included in many prominent group shows such as Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017), Nero su Bianco at the American Academy in Rome, Italy, 2015; Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, USA, 2014; Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, Cheim & Read, New York, 2013, and Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. He has won prizes including the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. Whitney's work is included in public collections such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
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