About the Exhibition

The exhibition begins with a gallery dedicated to three monumental, horizontal-format diptychs from 1993–94. These works recall Whitney’s first sojourn in Rome, marking the beginning of a lifetime of inspiration from Italian culture. While Whitney had been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over gestural fields since the mid-1970s, this visit to Rome marked a paradigm shift in his work, and Italian art and architecture soon became palpable in his abstractions. Whitney and his partner moved to Italy in 1992 as an escape from the New York art world—a difficult scene for an abstract artist of color to find a place in—and he was immediately drawn to the colors and forms surrounding him: the construction of the Pantheon and the Colosseum, Vatican City, the stacked urns in the Etruscan Museum, Renaissance history, as well as the play of the light on the buildings and the colors of the windows. In the diptychs on view, the circular forms of Whitney’s earlier paintings began to expand and draw towards each other, crowding out what might have previously been more open space in his compositions. Whitney has kept a studio outside Parma since the 1990s and the pace of that region became a key, albeit underrecognized, part of his creative practice.

In an adjacent gallery, visitors will see the next phase of Whitney’s journey, where these circular forms, grounded by horizontal bars, begin to coalesce into squares and rectangles while the space between them narrows further. The tightness of these stacked compositions announced a truly new direction and he began creating the densely gridded paintings he continues to make today, works characterized by architectural geometries, spontaneous brushwork, and endlessly variable juxtapositions of color.

In the Palazzo’s grandest space will be installed a series of more than a dozen of these square canvases from throughout the 2000s, allowing viewers to perceive the incredible diversity within the limitations Whitney begins imposing on his compositions during this period, a practice he continues to this day.

Another gallery will be largely dedicated to more than thirty diminutive canvases Whitney has been making for decades and which contain all of the power, experimentation, and incredible coloration found in his larger paintings, but on a scale that draws the visitor close, inviting intimate contemplation. Finally, throughout the exhibition, works on paper will give visitors a glimpse into Whitney’s remarkable practice more broadly. Twenty of the artist’s Italian sketchbooks will shine a light on the development of the artist’s ideas, his reading, travels, and the titles for his paintings, while ink drawings from the 1990s and a series of luminous gouaches from recent years hint at the way this artist’s remarkable practice is grounded in experimentation across media.

The exhibition is presented across the Noble Floor of the sixteenth century Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, located along the central stretch of the Grand Canal. Organized around a central hall—alongside an ornate balcony that looks over the Grand Canal and an additional terrace draped in a pergola of wisteria—the exhibition winds through the side rooms, each with its own unique character and décor. Whitney’s paintings are presented in dialogue with the Palazzo’s aesthetic history and remaining Venetian frescoes, painted by Andrea Meldola.

The Collateral Event is accompanied by a new publication featuring essays discussing the works on view and Whitney’s relationship with Italy as well as installation views. Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings precedes a major survey exhibition at the Buffalo AKG in Buffalo, NY, USA in 2024 organized by Cathleen Chaffee, Chief Curator.

About Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute as well as an MFA from Yale University and is currently professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Select solo exhibitions include FOCUS: Stanley Whitney at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2017) and Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015). Whitney has also been included in many prominent group shows, such as Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2018); documenta 14, Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany (2017); Nero su Bianco, American Academy in Rome, Italy (2015); Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract, Part 2: Hard Edges/Soft Curves, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2014); Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, Cheim & Read, New York (2013); and Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). He has been awarded the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). Whitney’s work is included in public collections around the world, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Long Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.