Stanley Whitney

Acquired from the artist's studio

“I start at the top and work down,” Stanley Whitney explains about his artistic process. “That gets into call-and-response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way round.” 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, Giorgio Morandi, and American quilting, Whitney composes with blocks and bars that articulate a chromatic dialogue in each canvas. He has spent many years experimenting with the seemingly limitless potential of a single compositional method, loosely dividing square canvases into multiple registers. Thinly applied oil paint retains his active brushstrokes and allows for transparency and tension at the overlapping borders between each rectilinear parcel of vivid color. He explores the shifting effects of freehand geometries at both intimate and grand scales as he deftly lays down successive blocks of paint, heeding the call of each color. Experimental jazz—Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman—is Whitney’s soundtrack, its defining improvisational method yielding ever new energies to his process of painting.