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. The cumulative effect of Whitney’s multicolored palette is not only one of masterly pictorial balance 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 favorite 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.
—Adapted and excerpted from https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/stanley-whitney, accessed 6-25-2021
Whitney’s vibrant abstract paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid, imbuing it with new and unexpected cadences of color, rhythm, and space. He derives inspiration from sources as diverse as Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, and American quilt-making. He explores the shifting effects of his freehand geometries at both intimate and grand scales. Experimental jazz—Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman—is Whitney’s soundtrack, its defining improvisational method yielding ever new energies to his process of painting.
—Adapted and excerpted from https://gagosian.com/artists/stanley-whitney/, accessed 6-25-2021
Stanley Whitney is an abstract painter born in Philadelphia. He earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, MO, and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. He is professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Temple University’s Tyler School o...
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