Stanley Whitney

American, 1946

Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color since the mid-1970s. The artist has studios in New York City and Parma, Italy, and his current motif is the stacked composition of numerous saturated color fields, delineated by horizontal bands running the length of a square-formatted canvas. Influenced by Minimalism and the Color Field movement, as well as jazz music and his favorite historical artists—Titian, Velázquez and Cézanne—Whitney is as much a proponent of the process-based, spatially-gridded square as artists Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin. His work has been shown in The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, USA; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Select solo exhibitions include Focus: Stanley Whitney at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA (2017) and Dance the Orange at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2015). Whitney’s work is included in public collections around the world, including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery. His solo exhibitions in 2020 include FOCUS: Stanley Whitney, Lisson Gallery, East Hampton, New York; No to Prison Life, Online Exhibition, Lisson Gallery; and Bertacca Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, Rome.