Stanley Whitney American, 1946

“I start at the top and work down,” explains Stanley Whitney. “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 quilt-making, Whitney composes with blocks and bars that articulate a chromatic call-and-response in each work. Whitney lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York, and Parma, Italy, and is currently Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia. His work is included in public collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Dance the Orange, a retrospective of his work, opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, in 2015; he has also had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2017), and Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice, Italy (2022). In 2017 he participated in Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany.