 |
| Stanley Whitney, Other Colors I Forget, 2012, oil on linen, 72 x 72 inches. Image via teamgal.com. |
Other
Colors I Forget
April 11 –
May 12, 2013
83 Grand
Street
New York,
NY 10013
Team
Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by the American
artist Stanley Whitney. The exhibition, entitled Other Colors I Forget,
will run from 11 April through 12 May 2013.
Stanley Whitney’s paintings are easy to
describe, but in between the descriptive terms that one can assign these
pictures, lays a very expansive field. For how can Whitney’s paintings be
gorgeous and difficult? How do they manage to appear both simple and complicated?
How do his paintings arrive stuffed full of chaos and order; of ease and
struggle? Whitney’s pictures not only pulse optically, they also throb with
tensions that arise from their conceptual dichotomies.
Whitney’s
latest exhibition takes its title from a six-foot square painting included in
this hanging. Other Colors I Forget, composed in the artist’s
signature style of loosely gridded squares of color, contrasts sanguine reds
and brilliant yellows, with wintry teals jostling against muted shades of pink
and olive. The colors burst at their edges, overlapping as they compete for the
viewer’s singular attention. Whitney considers colors the way we might consider
individuals, employing their expressive character, their moods, peculiarities
and their significance at particular moments in time. In Whitney’s paintings,
colors operate musically, containing within themselves the ability to bring out
emotions and to truly touch an audience.
Other
Colors I Forget foregrounds the two primary concerns of the veteran artist’s
painting practice – color and structure. The standard square support and
architectonic form provide a heightened sense of rhythm in the paintings as a
series. Within a set of strict formal constraints, Whitney interweaves opaque
and transparent layers of oil paint. Alongside solid blocks of color are
moments where Whitney allows a hint of the history of the specific painting to
peak from beneath an obscuring layer. These moments, suggesting both immediacy
and hesitation, reveal the layered intimacies of the artist’s process of
decision-making. Though resisting narrative, Whitney uses the medium of paint
to address personal interests and subject matter. A voracious reader and
devoted music listener, often a literary passage or musical phrase will inform
a new body of work. The paintings reveal personal fascinations with figures
such as Whitman, Miles Davis and James Brown, as well as Mondrian, Morandi,
Goya and Guston.
Each painting exists as a clear statement, a
unique apparatus which bridges the rich history and vast potential of painting
as a medium with Whitney’s personal desires. In spite of his own title’s
admission of the limits of memory, the seeming fullness of Whitney’s vision
begs the question – what could possibly have been omitted? Playful yet never
cloying, the exuberant colors of Whitney’s canvases belie a sensitive touch and
an emotional depth acquired over the course of a decades-long career.
Whitney was born in 1946 and has been exhibiting
his work since 1970. His work has been shown at museums including the American
Academy of Art and Letters, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Philadelphia; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Orange County
Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In
Europe, solo gallery exhibitions have been mounted in such cities as Berlin,
Brussels, Vienna and Rome.
This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at
Team Gallery. For further information, please call 212 279 9219.
No comments:
Post a Comment