Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color since the mid-1970s. His current motif, honed over many years, is a stacked composition of numerous saturated color fields, delineated by three to five horizontal bands running the length of a canvas. The cumulative effect of Whitney’s multicolored palette is not only one of masterly pictorial balance and a sense of continuum with other works in this ongoing series, 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, and Agnes Martin.
Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York, and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University. He is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. In 2024, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum presented a major retrospective survey of Whitney’s career. The exhibition traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and and will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston from April 17th– September 1st, 2025.
Solo exhibitions include Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice, an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale Museum (2022); Focus – Stanley Whitney at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, USA (2017); and Dance the Orange at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA (2015). His work has been included in significant group exhibitions, including Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, USA (2018), documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017), Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract at Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2014), and Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). He was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017), was awarded the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). Whitney’s work is held in the collections of many prominent museums, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Photo: Miranda Leighfield