Stanley Whitney: That’s Rome, 2019. © Stanley Whitney
Stanley Whitney at Gagosian Gallery Gagosian Gallery presents new paintings by Stanley Whitney. Originally scheduled to open in April, but delayed by the pandemic, this is his first exhibition with the gallery and his first major exhibition in Rome, where he lived for five years during the 1990s. It features paintings produced both in New York and Bertacca, Italy. September 10 – October 17, 2020.]]>
Source: Gagosian Gallery
Whitney’s vibrant abstract paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid, imbuing it with new and unexpected cadences of color, rhythm, and space. Deriving inspiration from sources as diverse as Piet Mondrian, free jazz, and American quilt making, Whitney composes with blocks and bars that articulate a chromatic call-and-response within the bounds of each canvas.
Whitney has spent decades experimenting with the seemingly limitless potential of a single compositional method, loosely dividing square canvases into multiple registers. 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. It was Roman art and architecture—including the imposing facades of the Colosseum and the Palazzo Farnese and the stacked shelves of funerary urns on display at the National Etruscan Museum—that informed Whitney’s nuanced understanding of the relationship between color and geometry.
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