Stanley Whitney at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

From 14 November 2024 to 16 March 2025

 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon presents the first retrospective exhibition of Stanley Whitney's (US, b. 1946) unique and powerful abstractions made over the course of his 50-year career. In the early 1990s, Whitney began grounding rounded forms of color within loose grids. He arrived at his mature work in 2002, when he began creating square, richly colored, irregular gridded abstractions of vibrant hues. The exhibition contextualizes Whitney's work within the artist's diverse sources of inspiration, including music, poetry, American quilts, and the history of art and architecture.

The retrospective charts the journey of Whitney's engagement with abstraction, beginning with early works from the 1970s and 1980s characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm. At the time, Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, object and field. His travels between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s-first to the American West, then to Italy, and finally to Egypt-transformed his work. Prior to this period, Whitney's paintings of colored forms were suspended in what he called "landscape air." Afterward, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, he began grounding his paintings with a loose but ever-present framework of horizontal lines.

In the decades since, Whitney has planned each painting around a fluid grid, allowing him to focus on endless and productive variations on the theme of color. The exhibition includes major paintings, extensive installations of the artist's improvisatory small paintings, and drawings and prints, which constitute a vital, often overlooked element of his practice. A chronological selection of the artist's sketchbooks offers a view into his engagement with the written word as well as contemporary social and political issues.