Stanley Whitney: There Will Be Song

Gagosian presents There Will Be Song, an exhibition of new paintings by Stanley Whitney. Opening March 30, this will be the gallery’s first exhibition of paintings by Whitney since announcing its representation of the artist.

Vibrant and lyrical, Whitney’s paintings emerge from his ongoing exploration of colour and composition. Each work is composed of rectilinear, predominantly monochrome blocks of oil colour in three or four registers demarcated by horizontal bands. Working extemporaneously within this compositional structure, the artist selects each successive tone in relation to those already applied. The paintings’ brushwork reveals the active trace of the artist’s hand through variations in direction of application and opacity of pigment.

Pursuing abstraction since the mid-1970s, Whitney consolidated a process-based approach while living in Rome in the 1990s. In Italy, he was captivated by ancient Roman murals and the transformative effect of light on the façades of historic buildings such as the Colosseum, prompting a new understanding of colour and geometry. Responding as well to his study of artists such as Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, and Mark Rothko, and to American quiltmakers, he has developed this body of work over the course of three decades.