A Special Presentation
3 March - 31 March 2018
New York, 22nd Street
A special presentation of Jack Whitten’s final painting is on display at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street (3rd floor) through 31 March 2018 in memory of our dear friend and artist.
Born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of abstract expressionists active in the 1960s, his work gradually distanced from the movement's aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns, focusing more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice.
The subtle visual tempos and formal techniques embedded in Whitten's work speak to the varied contexts of his early life. After a brief period studying medicine at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the late 1950s, Whitten pivoted his attentions to art, first attending the Southern University in Baton Rouge before moving to New York and enrolling at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1960, where he earned his BFA degree.
In the 1970s, Whitten's experiments with the materiality of paint reached a climax—removing a thick slab of acrylic paint from its support, Whitten realized that the medium could be coaxed into the form of an independent object. Whitten used this mode of experimentation to challenge pre-existing notions of dimensionality in painting, repeatedly layering slices of acrylic ribbon in uneven fields of wet paint to mimic the application of mosaic tessarae to wet masonry. Over the course of a six decade career, Whitten's work bridged rhythms of gestural abstraction and process art, arriving at a nuanced language of painting, which hovers between mechanical automation and intensely personal expression.
The Fact That It Amazes Me Does Not Mean I Relinquish It
13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Downtown Los Angeles
Arbeiten auf Papier / Works on Paper / Oeuvres sur Papier: 1975 – 2009
27 September – 20 December 2024
The Fact That It Amazes Me Does Not Mean I Relinquish It
13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Downtown Los Angeles
Arbeiten auf Papier / Works on Paper / Oeuvres sur Papier: 1975 – 2009
27 September – 20 December 2024
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