Image via alexandergray.com.
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September
11 - October 12, 2013
Opening reception: Wednesday,
September 11, 2013, 6-8pm
508 West 26th Street #215
New York, NY
From the
Alexander Gray Associates web site:
Alexander Gray Associates is
pleased to present an exhibition featuring new paintings by Jack Whitten,
accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalog. The presentation highlights the
most recent evolution of process in Whitten’s nearly 50-year career dedicated
to abstraction, manipulation, and subversion of traditional painting practices.
Scale, context, and history play
equally integral roles in the group of paintings on view. With its alluring,
slick black surface, the sprawling Remote Control (2013) is
both seductive and intimidating, alluding to the appeal and threat of
technology. In the massive Crushed Grid (2013), Whitten
reinvents the modernist grid by immersing a distorted net of acrylic ribbons in
thick layers of undulating paint. The varied effects of his material
experimentation add a sense of tension, depth, and motion; the result is an
array of illusory surface textures that seem solid and aerated, dense and
viscous yet fluid.
The memorial and homage paintings
in the exhibition further exemplify Whitten’s innovative consideration of
painting as object. Elements of three-dimensionality are applied to the canvas,
such as the acrylic molds in Nine Cosmic CDs: For The Firespitter
(Jayne Cortez) (2013). The radiant energy captured by Whitten’s vivid
palette provides insight into the fierce personality and artistic achievements
of the late poet who inspired the painting.
About his recent work Whitten
states, “I like the idea that people are suspended while asking questions about
process. I like the idea that the viewer might be frozen by wonder. I have
developed many conceptual and technical approaches over the past 50 years, and
now, all I’m doing is going back into my toolbox and using them. I am dealing
with the evolution of painting, Western abstract painting in particular. In
this way, evolution is the symbol I am trying to capture. That’s why each work
is so different, it is still in the act of evolving.”
Concurrent with the exhibition at
Alexander Gray Associates, Jack Whitten: Light Years 1971–1973 is
on view at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University September 17–December 22,
2013. Whitten’s painting, 9-11-01, is featured in The Encyclopedic Palace at
the 55th Venice Biennale through November 24, 2013. Whitten
will also be featured in the renowned traveling exhibition Blues for
Smoke at the Wexner Center for the Arts September 21, 2013–January 5,
2014, as well as the Gallery’s Art Basel Miami Beach 2013 presentation.
Whitten’s work will be the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2014.
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