Stanley Whitney »Yellow, Noon and Night«

The title of the exhibition, which is also the title of one of Whitney’s paintings, is, like most of his paintings, inspired by music, poetry and his love of reading: In this case by a blues song called Morning, Noon and Night. For the title Stanley Whitney simply replaced the word “Morning” with “Yellow” to introduce the aspect of colour. And the title also emphasises rhythm as a parameter that is essential to Whitney’s work: Whereas rhythm is central to Jazz and Blues, it is the colour that makes the beat in Whitney’s paintings.

Colour is what structures the paintings. For a long time Whitney has been working with square canvasses of different sizes, which he structures with up to four unequal bands consisting of one or more lines the width of a paintbrush. Starting from the top left–almost like writing a text–he fills the bands with a series of non-uniform rectangles and squares of different colour. This process, which ends at the bottom right of the canvas, can be repeated two or three times. The choice of colour is intuitive and the result of the painting process which is unpredictable an unknown.

Whitney works with the system of “call-and-response”, which is a principle used across multiple disciplines, and in music is typical in spirituals, gospels, blues and jazz. He paints one colour and then decides which colour responds to the first one. This very simple principle results in the fact that the same colour is almost never used twice and the colours become more and more complex. And yet, Whitney’s paintings seem easy, almost effortless. They are playful and strictly formal at the
same time. This is similar to Jazz–which seems easy–as Whitney explains: “As if you could just get up and play the instruments, that there’s no struggle with how it’s done. It’s like Coltrane using a simple melody. I just use a simple square”.
Despite their complex colour scheme Whitney’s compositions are always harmonic and show his joy for colour and composition. They are rhythmic, melodic, and intense. „The idea is sound through colour, creating a polyrhythm and confronting something very beautiful with a lot of humanity to see something that you think you know but then realize you don’t“ (Stanley Whitney).

Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 in Philadelphia and currently lives and works in New York and Solignano, Italy. His works have been featured in numerous international exhibitions since the early seventies. His work was part of the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) in the project Utopia Station, and was also shown in the Dakar Biennal (2004). Museum exhibitions include the National Academy Museum, New York (2012), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (2008), the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio (1991), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1985), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1983), the Alternative Museum, New York (1981), the Studio Museum in Harlem (1981) and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (1976). He is the recipient of the John Guggenheim Fellowship (1996) and Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2002) as well as winning the First Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011).