Stanley Whitney

One of the great colourists of his generation, Stanley Whitney is an American artist known for his vibrant abstract paintings. Inspired by jazz, architecture and art history, his distinctive square grids of coloured blocks have earned him international acclaim.

Whitney was born in 1946 and grew up in a small African-American community in Pennsylvania. He moved to New York in 1968, where he completed his MFA at Yale School of Art. He admired the work of Paul Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi and Piet Mondrian, as well as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists. During this period Whitney also became friends with Robert Rauschenberg, who helped to acquaint him with the New York art scene.

Whitney’s early paintings consisted of loose patches of colour, often surrounded by white space. It was not until a trip to Italy and Egypt in the 1990s, however, that his art began to assume its current form. Whitney visited the Colosseum, the National Archaeological Museum in Naples and the pyramids. Inspired by these ancient structures, he began to experiment with a more architectural approach to colour, tessellating his hues and later dividing them with horizontal strips. These works have achieved strong prices at auction: Great Balls of Fire (2005) sold for £1,482,000 at Christie’s in 2022, more than doubling its high estimate.

Whitney has long been fascinated by music, admiring jazz legends such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. His paintings adopt a similar improvisatory approach. Whitney begins his canvases at the top, allowing each colour to dictate the next. He describes this method as ‘call and response’. Working with thin layers of oil paint, he relishes the tensions and vibrations that occur where the colours meet. Drawings and sketchbooks also form an important part of his practice, allowing him to experiment with different colours and structures.

Whitney’s art experienced a surge of interest following his retrospective Dance the Orange at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2015. He participated in Documenta 14 in 2017, and mounted his celebrated exhibition The Italian Paintings at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi during the 2022 Venice Biennale. Along with his wife — the painter Marina Adams — he divides his time between New York and Parma, Italy.