Stanley Whitney

Karma is pleased to present the work of New York-based artist Stanley Whitney. The exhibition features drawings and paintings made in the 1990’s. An exacting glimpse into the decades-long career of a painter working predominately in color and abstraction, the exhibition highlights Whitney’s bolder, looser, gestural brush work, which predates his current grid-like structured oil on linen paintings.

Whitney's paintings can be characterized as vessels for narrative, often with evocative titles:

Radical Openness

Goya's Lantern

My Whatever Means Necessary

Unpronounceable Freedom

James Brown Sacrifice to Apollo

Backyard Green

Interior Colors

Early America

Exceptionally Black

Ice Cube

Red High Rise

Dangerous Color

Other Colors I Forget

Bodyheat

The Trials of Misfortune

In Our Songs

First Minute of a Dream

Like the arrangement of words and phrases, Whitney arranges color and shape. Color is a language, where each hue is a different word with a different meaning. The designation of meanings are rarely repeated and ultimately the expressions change from painting to painting. Whitney's syntax forms a poetic rendering of his personal experience; dealing with issues of race and politics, music and poetry, family and influences.

A comprehensive survey publication will be launched on the occasion of the exhibition. Published by Karma, the book chronicles Whitney's practice since 1979 to 2015, revealing the artist's trajectory and progression of the past four decades.

Stanley Whitney (b.1946) received his MFA from Yale University in 1972. He has shown at numerous institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach. Whitney will be the subject of a solo survey exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in July, 2015.