Jack Whitten

10 June – 29 July 2022

Zurich, Limmatstrasse

Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse presents Whitten’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, coinciding with Zurich Art Weekend and Art Basel. ‘Jack Whitten’ features paintings and works on paper created during the late 1960s, many of which have never been exhibited before.

Whitten’s artistic production of the late 1960s serves as a reflection of his experiences of living in a socially and creatively charged era, shaped by the events that constituted its tumultuous political landscape. Concluding this significant chapter of the artist’s constantly evolving practice, the painting’s distinctive style indicates Whitten’s success in forging his own path as an abstractionist.

Light Sheet I

Satori

1969

NY Battle Ground

King’s Wish (Martin Luther’s Dream)

1968

USA Oracle (Assassination of M.L. King)

1968

Light Sheet II

1969

As Whitten would demonstrate throughout his career, his instinct was to respond to his time and the sociopolitical climate that defined it. Combined with his experiences of growing up in the South and having adopted Martin Luther King Jr’s call for non-violence before arriving in New York, Whitten’s creative output was his attempt to make sense of the world and express his role within it.

Psychic Square

1969

Black God Appears AKA Port Almanac

1966

Valley Of Thighs

1967

Ancestral Landscape

1967

Circular Garden

1968

Atlantis Rising

1966

This period of experimentation and the works that emerged from it led to an awakening by the end of the decade. Despite the lack of institutional support that he received as a Black artist in New York, he remained committed to his painterly endeavours and effectively reconfigured the discipline of painting. As the artist stated, ‘Experimentation expands consciousness. When consciousness expands freedom expands.’

Guardian Of The Field I

1967

Guardian Of The Field II

1967

Shantyville

1968

Untitled

1969

Untitled

1969

Untitled

1969

On view in Zurich, Limmatstrasse

The gallery is open Tue – Fri, 11 am – 6pm, Sat, 11 am – 5 pm. Please visit our location page to plan your visit.

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About the Artist

Jack Whitten

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.