News / Events

September 27–October 7, 2022

The Freedom We Fight For (2022), a new painting by Stanley Whitney, will be featured in a single-lot benefit auction hosted by Artsy, in partnership with Gagosian. All proceeds from the sale will support Art for Justice Fund and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York in their respective urgent fights for decarceration and criminal justice reform and reproductive rights in the United States. The artwork is viewable at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York, during the auction.

The eighty-inch-square oil-on-linen abstract painting underscores Whitney’s facility as a colorist. Pieced together from rectilinear fields of red, yellow, green, blue, orange, brown, black, and gray divided by horizontal bands of red, blue, and teal, its “stacked” composition, translucent layers of paint, and energetic brushwork effectively deconstruct the modernist grid. Whitney draws inspiration from Greek and Mediterranean ceramics and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern Roman architecture.

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Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Stanley Whitney. Renowned for the depth of his exploration into the expressive potentials of painted color and form, Whitney has been committed to abstraction since the mid-1970s. While living in Rome in the 1990s, he consolidated a process-based painterly approach which he has now sustained and developed over the course of three decades.

The Baltimore Museum of Art has commissioned Stanley Whitney to create a set of three large-scale stained-glass windows, titled Dance with Me Henri, for the new Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, an approximately 2,500-square-foot space on the first floor of the museum dedicated to the study of Henri Matisse, opening December 2021. Whitney has long been recognized for his vibrant explorations of color and light within the painterly structures of the grid and has often cited historic European painting—including the work of Matisse and, in particular, Matisse’s glass windows for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in southern France—as a source of inspiration for his formal investigations. To create the panels, Whitney is working with Franz Mayer of Munich, one of the world’s oldest and most celebrated artist glass studios.