Stanley Whitney
Untitled, 2026
Lithograph
19 x 22 3/4"
Edition of 30
 
Created by Stanley Whitney at the legendary ULAE studios, 100% of the purchase price of this inaugural benefit edition benefits the grant-making programs of the IFPDA Foundation. (Shipping is offered at an additional cost and will be coordinated directly with buyers after check-out.)
 
About the Artist (Courtesy of Gagosian)
 
Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in 1968. He graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1972, but found himself at odds with the politically and theoretically oriented contemporary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, confronting the expectation that an African American artist should contend directly with themes of racial and cultural identity. Whitney was more interested in honing an abstract visual language, his early works incorporating patches of color surrounded by areas of empty space. At this stage in his career he was also focused on the power of gesture and immersed in the daily practice of drawing.
 
Although Whitney has been deeply invested in chromatic experimentation throughout his career, he consolidated his distinctive approach during a period spent living and working in Rome in the 1990s, shifting his compositions from untethered amorphous forms to the denser stacked arrangements that characterize his mature style. It was Roman art and architecture—including the imposing façades of the Colosseum and the Palazzo Farnese and the stacked shelves of funerary urns on display at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco—that informed his nuanced understanding of the relationship between color and geometry. Italy remains a central and enduring source of inspiration for Whitney, who spends his summers painting at his studio near Parma.
 
Yet while the dynamics and characteristics of Whitney’s application make reference to basic architectural structures, his light, free, and rapid application subverts any implication of gravity. Reveling in the improvisational alchemy at play in his compositions, Whitney also skirts any claim to a personal theory of color: “I like to leave it as pure magic,” he states. “People say the color does this, or the color does that. And I say the color does what it does.”
 
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.