Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon presents the first retrospective exhibition of Stanley Whitney’s (US, b. 1946) unique and powerful abstractions made over the course of his 50-year career. In the early 1990s, Whitney began grounding rounded forms of color within loose grids. He arrived at his mature work in 2002, when he began creating square, richly colored, irregular gridded abstractions of vibrant hues. The exhibition contextualizes Whitney’s work within the artist’s diverse sources of inspiration, including music, poetry, American quilts, and the history of art and architecture.
The retrospective charts the journey of Whitney’s engagement with abstraction, beginning with early works from the 1970s and 1980s characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm. At the time, Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, object and field. His travels between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s—first to the American West, then to Italy, and finally to Egypt—transformed his work. Prior to this period, Whitney’s paintings of colored forms were suspended in what he called “landscape air.” Afterward, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, he began grounding his paintings with a loose but ever-present framework of horizontal lines.
In the decades since, Whitney has planned each painting around a fluid grid, allowing him to focus on endless and productive variations on the theme of color. The exhibition includes major paintings, extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings, and drawings and prints, which constitute a vital, often overlooked element of his practice. A chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks offers a view into his engagement with the written word as well as contemporary social and political issues.
Exhibition Catalogue
A major catalogue accompanies the exhibition, available in the Walker Shop and published by the Buffalo AKG in collaboration with DelMonico Books. The book features essays by exhibition curator Cathleen Chaffee; as well as Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; and Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy at the Walker Art Center. It also includes texts by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Duro Olowu, a London-based fashion designer and curator; as well as correspondence between the artist and Norma Cole, a poet, painter, and translator; and an interview with Whitney by art historian Grégoire Lubineau.
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Curatorial Team
Exhibition Curator: Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Walker Coordinating Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
Before Your Visit
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