Stanley Witney

A longstanding and beloved icon of contemporary painting in New York, Stanley Whitney (born 1946) has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multihued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. Whitney’s works on paper and preparatory sketchbooks are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color. Whitney has noted: “For me, drawing is a way to understand where things are in space. I felt that I needed to work on space because I didn’t want my color to be decorative. I wanted color to have real intellect.” Sketchbook is a precise facsimile of one of the artist’s Moleskine notebooks, featuring his notes, sketches and color investigations for recent paintings.