Stanley Whitney was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on November 11, 1946.[1][2] The third of four children, his father was a real estate agent and accountant, and his mother worked for the board of education in nearby Philadelphia. The family were part of Bryn Mawr's small, working-class black community, and lived in an apartment above a store owned by his father.[3][4]
As an art student in Kansas City, Whitney chose not to involve himself with the Black Panther Party, and resisted pressure for African-American artists to make overtly political work about black identity and experience.[6][7]
An exhibition of Stanley Whitney's paintings at documenta 14 (2017)
Painting
Whitney has engaged in abstraction since early in his career, and is best known for his paintings which take the form of "grids" of color, arranged in four rows. He arrived at this mode while working in Italy in the 1990s, after the sights of stone blocks in ancient monuments and closely-stacked funeral urns at the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci led Whitney to reconcile his concepts of space and color in painting: “When I understood that, I felt I had the last piece of the puzzle. Space is in the color – boom, I’ve got it."[5][12] Other influences cited by Whitney have included Paul Cézanne, Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and the quilters of Gee's Bend.[13][14]
In a 2015 interview, Whitney considered: "I never think about the structure as a grid—though it is a grid, really. I’m a real New York City painter, if you know what I mean. My paintings are just the way New York is. I want that kind of simplicity, which is also the madness of New York, because of the color. So you have this contradiction, in a sense. There’s the grid, which should be very orderly, and then you put the color, and it throws the whole thing off."[4] In a given work, he will begin painting with a single stripe of color beginning at the top-left corner of his canvas, and then paint along and down in square forms using a method inspired by jazz improvisation: “Once I’ve got one color down, it will tell me what the next color will be.”[5]
Other media
Whitney has also worked in monotype and in drawing, and premiered his first work in stained glass in 2022. Created to fulfill a commission by the Baltimore Museum of Art for permanent installation in their Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, Whitney's suite of stained glass windows were inspired by Henri Matisse's work at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence.[15][16]
Recognition
Whitney worked in "relative obscurity" for the majority of his career, often failing to sell paintings; he did not stage an exhibition in a public institution until he was 68 years old.[17][18] He began to receive public acclaim in the early 21st century after adopting what became his signature style. A 2015 New York Times review praised his work for having "quietly and firmly expanded abstraction’s possibilities."[19] By 2023, The Guardian had named Whitney "the greatest abstract artist in America."[5]
Whitney is represented by Galerie Nordenhake since 2012,[24] and has exhibited across the three locations of the gallery in Berlin, Stockholm, and Mexico City.[25] He is also represented by Gagosian Gallery since 2022, having previously staged his first exhibition with Gagosian at the gallery's Rome location in 2020.[26] At previous phases of his career, he was represented by and staged solo exhibitions with Lisson Gallery,Matthew Marks Gallery, Team Gallery, Galerie Christine König, and Albert Baronian.[4][14]
In 2022, his painting Forward to Black (1996) sold for over US$2.3 million at Sotheby's in New York, setting a record for the artist.[27][28] In 2024, two of Whitney's paintings became the subject of multimillion-dollar legal filings between art dealer Gary Tatintsian and art collector Andrey Isaev.[29]
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