'Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off.' Marlene Dumas' poetic and sensual refrain accompanies her figurative watercolours on view in Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in the southern state of Kerala, India (12 December 2018–29 March 2019).Dumas' new series...
The paintings of Ellen Altfest are ethereal in their detail. Fields of minutiae come together as pulsating images; small brushstrokes of oil paint accumulate over a series of months to single out seemingly innocuous subjects, such as a hand resting atop patterned fabric (The Hand, 2011) or a deep green cactus reaching upwards from beneath a bed of...
On the rooftop of the former Rio Hotel complex in Colombo, it was hard to ignore the high-rise buildings, still under construction, blocking all but a sliver of what used to be an open view over Slave Island, once an island on Beira Lake that housed slaves in the 19th century, and now a downtown suburb. The hotel was set alight during the...
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.
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.
The secluded London studio of Shirazeh Houshiary foxes my Uber driver entirely. But I shouldn't be surprised that the Iranian-born artist is off-grid. Among a heap of volumes that litter her studio floor is Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, the quantum physicist whose luminous texts explain why Newtonian laws of space and time can only...
Last week, after reading the interview 'Have Aliens Found Us?' between the writer Isaac Chotiner and Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, in The New Yorker, I thought about Susan. She would have liked it, I imagined, because it discusses the fact that all the images of Oumuamua – an interstellar and possibly alien object detected...
In the opening image of John Akomfrah's Mimesis: African Soldier (2018), we are confronted by a row of black and brown faces who smile nervously and knowingly into the camera. They represent the faces we seldom see in war documentaries or history books; their smiles evoke a quiet sense of unease and foreboding. Once the colonial subjects of empire,...
For centuries, artists and philosophers have theorised about the relationship between private and public space, materially and conceptually. In Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life (1947), he discusses the relationship between personal and private life as an 'interconnectedness', where our internal and external lives mutually inform one...