joseph scissorhands: Stanley Whitney: There Will Be Song

Sunday 30 April 2023

Stanley Whitney: There Will Be Song

Stanley Whitney - Bridge, 2022

"The colour makes the structure" - Stanley Whitney.

To Gagosian Grosvenor Hill to experience Stanley Whitney's large-scale paintings in his first show with Gagosian, having formerly been with Lisson Gallery. There Will be Song is the bold title of the exhibition and Whitney certainly serves up a cacophony of colour. Whitney is foremost a colourist and an artist in the tradition of Mondrian and Agnes Martin who engages with the grid in his work. The use of grids in my own work was something I began to explore in lockdown (here), and which I have continued to experiment with in some new works to be revealed at a future date. Whitney begins a new work by painting a horizontal line across the top of the canvas before then applying areas of saturated colour moving from left to right creating a vibrant, slightly wonky grid. Traces of the artists hand are very visible in brushstrokes and drips of paint which give the works a sense of warmth and humanity unlike some of the more severe compositional grids of Mondrian. Whitney works intuitively letting one colour dictate what the neighbouring colour will be, resulting in canvases that are like patchwork quilts or stained glass windows. Most of the canvases here are energetic, whilst one or two are more sombre in tone and palette, which I guess is solely down to the artist's mood at the moment of creation. The paintings and the vivid and contrasting colour placements have a strong sense of rhythm and movement. Unsurprisingly Whitney is a big jazz fan and listens to the same music - Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" each time he paints, claiming this album puts him 'in the zone'. I would have thought that such strict adherence to such a compositional format would become too repetitive or boring, but Whitney doesn't appear to find the grid format restricting and states that the colours actually 'free him'. These paintings are a nice reflection of the seasons as we finally shake off winter and embrace the warmth and colour of spring.