ART CITIES: N.York-Stanley Whitney
Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color 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 color fields, delineated by between three to five horizontal bands running the length of a square-formatted canvas.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
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. The thinly applied oil paint retains his active brushwork and allows for a degree of transparency and tension at the borders between each rectilinear parcel of vivid color. In varying canvas sizes, he explores the shifting effects of his freehand geometries at both intimate and grand scales as he deftly lays down successive blocks of paint, heeding the call of each color. Although Whitney has been deeply invested in chromatic experimentation throughout his career, he consolidated his distinctive approach during a formative trip to Italy in 1992, shifting his compositions from untethered amorphous forms to the denser stacked arrangements that characterize his mature style. Featuring new paintings and works on paper, Stanley Whitney presents his solo exhibition “By the Love of Those Unloved”. A master colorist, Whitney takes an exploratory and lyrical approach to painting. Each of his canvases is structured as a loose grid of rectilinear blocks in three or four rows. Laying down one vivid color at a time, the artist establishes relationships between each area, its neighbors, and the composition as a whole, employing gestural brushwork to juxtapose hues applied with varied degrees of opacity. Between each row are linear bands that ground the composition and sometimes extend the tones of individual blocks. Inspired by jazz, Whitney defines a space within which to improvise, each painting setting a unique group of chromatic and spatial harmonies in motion. “Peaches: (2023) is dominated by the warm pinks and oranges suggested by its title, which stand in contrast to the cooler blues, blacks, and greens with which they are paired. Spanning ten feet in width, “As Wild as the World 2” (2023) reveals the visual impact of scale in conjunction with Whitney’s iterative technique. “High Hopes” (2024) is a study in contrasts, with complementary pairs of red/green and orange/blue pressing against one another. The loose brushstrokes and more muted tones at the top and bottom of “Tribute to Billie” (2024) establish a sonorous composition that evokes the expressive power and vulnerability of its namesake, Billie Holiday. With an unwavering commitment to abstraction, Whitney uses titles that resonate with his inspirations: art and architecture, poetry and music, contemporary issues and observations. On the title of this exhibition, he notes: “I first read this line in a poem in Rome in 1994 and used it as the title of a painting that year. The line stayed with me, and I ended up using it for the title of another painting in 2004. Now, thirty years later, those words seem to resonate with the time we’re living in more than ever”.
Photo: Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2019 Gouache on paper, 22 × 30 inches (55.9 × 76.2 cm), © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/5-22/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
