Stanley Whitney

The esteemed American painter Stanley Whitney has, for 50 years, created joyful, immersive abstractions characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm. Over the last 20 years, he has structured his paintings as loose grids: a consistent framework that frees him to work through seemingly infinite painterly variations and allows viewers to focus not on each painting’s subject, but rather on our own response to color. These large-scale paintings are joined by improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints, which constitute their own practice for Whitney; and the artist’s sketchbooks, which offer a view into Whitney’s engagement with the written word and politics.
This traveling North American exhibition is Whitney’s first museum survey, presenting 170 paintings and works on paper spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The catalog includes an introduction by exhibition organizer Cathleen Chaffee, scholarly explorations of the artist’s paintings and works on paper, a chronology and illustrations of all works in the exhibition.
Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 near Philadelphia. By the early 1970s, following studies with Philip Guston and Robert Reed, and influenced by artists including Jack Whitten, Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian, he had come to see “endless possibilities” in abstraction. Over the past five decades, he has honed a unique body of densely gridded, but endlessly variable, abstract paintings, as well as drawings and prints, reflecting his interests in art, architecture, textiles and music.

Stanley Whitney’s (born 1946) energetic parcels of color, ever-shifting grids and spatial intensity have been consolidated by over three decades of painting in Italy. It could not be more fitting, then, that Whitney opens an exhibition in the Venice Biennale 2022.
Bringing together for the first time his acclaimed Italian Paintings, this publication, printed on the occasion of the artist's presentation during the 2022 Venice Biennale, compiles works exclusively created in Italy and charts the evolution of his stacked, multihued compositions. It includes works dating to the early 1990s and Whitney's formative period in Rome, where he would live for five years, to more recent paintings undertaken over summers spent in his studio near Parma.
Alongside a selection of the Italian Paintings, the publication includes installation photography from the exhibition, pages from Whitney's sketchbooks and essays by the exhibition's cocurators, Vincenzo de Bellis and Cathleen Chaffee.

New York–based painter Stanley Whitney (born 1946) is known for his vivid multicolored abstract paintings, with stacked irregular rectangles of color in a loose grid composition on square-format canvases.

In this new slipcased volume, featuring a unique design with 12 gatefolds, Whitney extends his trademark style to a smaller scale. He produces his smaller “afternoon paintings” with the leftover paint after completing a large painting. These works express Whitney’s dedication to the consistency of his painting, which he likens to athletic training or the “wood-shedding” that jazz musicians invoke when describing time spent honing their improvisatory skills behind closed doors.

Featuring an introductory essay by writer and critic Lynne Tillman, this book provides an intimate, expressive glimpse into the mind of a master when he is “more relaxed, more loose, more carefree.”

Color inspires and informs the work of New York artist Stanley Whitney (born 1946), whose paintings explore the many possibilities created by the tessellation and juxtaposition of irregular rectangles in varying shades of strength and subtlety. Within the composition of these adjacent nodes—a structure that fluctuates between freedom and constraint, between endless open fields and controlled boundaries—is ultimately a play between complementing and competing areas of color.

In the Color investigates Whitney's profound relationship to color and its spatial effects throughout his career. The clothbound publication has been produced in a unique size that exactly matches the scale of Whitney's smallest oil on linen works, and catalogs in full color a number of works from the 1990s to the present that were included in Whitney's fourth exhibition with Lisson Gallery. Art historian and scholar Adrianna Campbell's essay, “The Primacy of Color,” prefaces the publication.

A longstanding and beloved icon of contemporary painting in New York, Stanley Whitney (born 1946) has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multihued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. Whitney’s works on paper and preparatory sketchbooks are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color. Whitney has noted: “For me, drawing is a way to understand where things are in space. I felt that I needed to work on space because I didn’t want my color to be decorative. I wanted color to have real intellect.” Sketchbook is a precise facsimile of one of the artist’s Moleskine notebooks, featuring his notes, sketches and color investigations for recent paintings.