Stanley Whitney @ Gagosian, Athens - 'Return to the Garden' Exhibition

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden

Gagosian, Athens

October 2, 2025 – January 17, 2026

Stanley Whitney

The Courage of the Poet, 2025

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Return to the Garden, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Stanley Whitney in Athens. This is Whitney’s first exhibition in Greece since his participation in Documenta 14 in 2017.

The exhibition’s title, Return to the Garden, evokes themes of arcadian innocence and harmony with nature. Unencumbered by preconceived subjects or narrative elements, these vibrant abstractions offer viewers the opportunity to engage with a heightened awareness of color and perception.

Stanley Whitney asserts the power of color through loose grids of roughly rectangular shapes, creating compositions of three or four rows separated by horizontal bands that traverse the canvas. Characterized by active brushwork, layered pigment, and jostling borders, each field is defined in relation to its neighbors and to each painting as a whole. In some works, he repeats variations of the same hues either between multiple blocks or extended across their lateral bands, establishing myriad formal connections and contrasts. 

Stanley Whitney

On the Street Where You Live, 2024

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

By sustaining this format, Stanley Whitney has developed a compositional framework from which to produce individual canvases full of unexpected, energetic harmonies between vivid colors and fluid gestures. Influenced by traditions including Abstract Expressionism and quiltmaking, his paintings additionally parallel the polyphonies and syncopation of jazz, forming compelling expressions of creativity and freedom.

Stanley Whitney also admires ancient Greek vase painting, particularly of the preclassical Geometric and Archaic eras (c. 900–500 BCE). Painted by hand and divided into banded registers, the abstract linear patterns of these early vases underly the compositions of later, more figurative styles. In looking to such ancient sources when developing his stacked compositions, Stanley Whitney draws upon an interest in archaic forms that similarly motivated both the Abstract Expressionists and earlier modernists.

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney

Roma 55, 2023

Oil on linen

24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

In another connection with Mediterranean antiquity, the title of the Roma series (2017–) speaks to the inspiration Stanley Whitney found in Rome, where he lived and worked for five years in the 1990s. It was then that he consolidated the approach to abstraction that he continues to explore, a method sparked in part by the ancient architecture and murals that he encountered there and in Egypt. Unlike the straight lines of modern construction, the weathered, hand-built structures of the ancient world possess irregular contours and surfaces that correspond with the gestural demarcations of Whitney’s paintings.

Other works featured in Return to the Garden include new paintings from the ongoing Stay Song series (2017–), which Stanley Whitney debuted in Athens for Documenta 14, as well as the Monk & Munch paintings (2020–). In these rectangular canvases, he pays homage to jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and expressionist painter Edvard Munch, highlighting essential relationships between art and music.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens 11521

gagosian.com

Related Posts:

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, April 17 – September 1, 2025

Stanley Whitney: Dance With Me Henri 

Baltimore Museum of Art, November 20, 2022 –  April 23, 2023

Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art

The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, February 8 – May 6, 2018

Stanley Whitney: Drawings

Lisson Gallery, New York, 8 September – 21 October 2017

Stanley Whitney: Paintings

Lisson Gallery, Milan, 2 October – 13 November 2015

Stanley Whitney @ ICA Boston - "Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon" Retrospective Exhibition

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

April 17 - September 1, 2025

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon. The ICA/Boston is the last stop for this major touring survey, which traces the development of Stanley Whitney’s unique and powerful abstractions over his 50-year career. The exhibition includes over 100 works, featuring extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints; and a selection of his sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, offering a view into Stanley Whitney’s endless variations on the theme of color, form, and his engagement with the written word. 

“Like the 1940 song, penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, that inspired the exhibition’s title, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon conveys feelings of enchantment through the artist’s consistent yet wholly expansive paintings,” said Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA. “Whitney’s abstractions create a space for viewers focus on their wide-ranging responses to color, rather than a specific subject.” 

This exhibition places Stanley Whitney’s color-saturated paintings in the context of his diverse sources of inspiration, which include jazz and soul music, poetry, American quilting traditions, and global histories of art and architecture. Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while making works characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm, Stanley Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, and of object and field. His travels through the American West, Italy, and Egypt in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s transformed his work. Prior this period, Whitney’s paintings of colorful forms were suspended in what Stanley Whitney called “landscape air.” In the decades since, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, including Egyptian Pyramids and the Roman Colosseum, he began grounding his paintings with the loose but ever-present framework featuring horizontal rows of alternately askant and ordered squares, resulting in the loosely gridded abstractions that capture the imagination of audiences today. 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon surveys Stanley Whitney’s extensive investigation of color at the true height of his career. The survey features the artist’s large-scale explorations of color alongside his improvisatory small paintings. His drawings and prints provide vital, and often overlooked, context to the artist’s practice. These smaller works are exhibited alongside a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021 to provide a view into Stanley Whitney’s engagement with the written word, and contemporary social and political issues.

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

Exhibition Catalogue

Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2024

This career retrospective is accompanied by a catalogue featuring new essays by Cathleen Chaffee and host curators Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, and Pavel S. Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. It also features texts by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Normal Cole, a poet, designer, painter, and translator; and Duro Olowu, a London-based fashion designer and curator. These examinations of and reflections on the arc of Whitney’s career are presented alongside full-color reproductions of the works featured in the exhibition, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive interview with the artist by Grégoire Lubineau and a conversation between Normal Cole and Stanley Whitney.

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ICA’s presentation is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator. 

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210

www.icaboston.org

Related Post:

Stanley Whitney: Dance With Me Henri, Baltimore Museum of Art, November 20, 2022 -  April 23, 2023

Stanley Whitney @ Baltimore Museum of Art - BMA - Dance With Me Henri

Stanley Whitney: Dance With Me Henri

Baltimore Museum of Art

November 20, 2022 -  April 23, 2023

STANLEY WHITNEY

Dance with me Henri (center window sketch). 2021

The Baltimore Museum of Art: 

Commissioned by the Baltimore Museum of Art, 

supported by Art Fund established with exchange funds 

from  gifts of  Dr. and Mrs. Edgar F. Berman, 

Equitable Bank, N.A., Geoffrey Gates,  Sandra O. Moose, 

National Endowment for the Arts,  Lawrence Rubin, 

Philip M. Stern, and Alan J. Zakon, BMA 2021.189

© Stanley Whitney

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents a focus exhibition of works by acclaimed artist STANLEY WHITNEY that highlights his career-long engagement with the work of Henri Matisse and draws parallels between the two artists’ visionary use of color and line. The exhibition follows Whitney’s celebrated commission of three stained-glass windows for the BMA’s Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, which debuted with the Center’s opening in December 2021. Never-before-seen sketches and studies for the windows are presented alongside a selection of Matisse’s prints from the 1930s and 1940s chosen by Stanley Whitney. 

Stanley Whitney has often cited historic European painting as a source of inspiration, including the work of Matisse and in particular Matisse’s glass windows for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in Southern France. Stanley Whitney’s stained-glass windows for the BMA marked the artist’s first museum commission and his first time working in stained glass, translating his interest in expressions of color in a medium naturally suited to it. His process of articulating stacks of color and experimenting with opacity and transparency provided the ideal method to translate the traditional aspects of stained glass into new contemporary possibilities.

The exhibition, presented in the Jay McKean Fisher Gallery adjacent to the stained-glass windows, features three of the watercolor and graphite sketches for the commission; one earlier drawing made in explicit homage to Henri Matisse; and five monotypes in watercolor and crayon. These works on paper reveal Whitney’s attention to color and light, as well as organic line and a sense of play that resonates with Matisse’s legacy. They are paired with seven prints by Henri Matisse that Stanley Whitney selected from the BMA’s extensive holdings. Rare lithographs from the 1930s depict the movement of an acrobatic dancer that highlight Matisse’s interest in line, balance, and poise. Color stencil prints (pochoirs) from Matisse’s groundbreaking book Jazz (1947) capture his explorations of pure color and improvisation that laid the foundations for his work in glass. This work dovetails with Stanley Whitney’s own engagement with jazz, which has served as a critical influence since the 1960s.

“Dance With Me Henri is grounded in Stanley Whitney’s deep love for Matisse,” said curator Katy Siegel. “The installation contextualizes Whitney’s remarkable stained-glass windows and highlights the rich layers of connection between the artists’ works and interests. Through Stanley’s eyes, we see Matisse’s saturated color and organic line as utterly contemporary—he brings French modern art into dialogue with a world that includes jazz, architecture, mid-century NYC painting, and the quilts of Gee’s Bend.”

Stanley Whitney: Dance With Me Henri is curated by Katy Rothkopf, The Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Director of The Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies and Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, and Katy Siegel, former BMA Senior Research & Programming Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University.

STANLEY WHITNEY

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages since the mid-1970s. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA (2017) and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2015). He has been featured in many prominent group shows, including Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017); Nero su Bianco at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (2015); and Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), among others. Whitney has been awarded the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). His work is in a range of public collections, including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, KS; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. 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, Temple University. Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, a collateral event to the 59th Venice Biennial, is currently on view at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice, through November 27, 2022. A major retrospective surveying his career will be presented in 2024 at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY and will be traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

MATISSE COLLECTION

The Matisse collection at the BMA was first established in the early 20th century through the vision and philanthropy of sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, whose internationally renowned collection was bequeathed to the museum in 1949 and is the centerpiece of the BMA’s expansive holdings. Among the highlights of the Cone Collection are more than 600 works by Matisse, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books. To this incredible group of objects, the BMA has added hundreds of works by the artist, amassing the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Henri Matisse works in a public museum. This includes gifts from members of the Matisse family, such as a selection of works from the collection of the artist’s daughter Marguerite Duthuit, and a major donation of prints by The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation in New York. In December 2021, the BMA opened The 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. The establishment of the center fulfilled the BMA’s long-term strategic goal to increase research and presentation opportunities for the museum’s incomparable collection of works by the artist.

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART  - BMA

10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218

artba.org

Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art, San Antonio, Texas

Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art
The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
February 8 - May 6, 2018

Charles Alston

Girl in a Red Dress, 1934 

Oil on canvas 

The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts 

Pioneering collectors Harriet and Harmon Kelley paved the way for the collection of African American art by museums and private individuals across San Antonio, Texas, and the United States. Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art illustrates the Kelley Collection’s impact on our cultural landscape by juxtaposing works from their renowned holdings with loans from the burgeoning collections of African American art of Guillermo Nicolas and Jim Foster, John and Freda Facey, and the McNay Art Museum. Something to Say is the first survey of modern and contemporary African American art to be presented at the McNay.

William Henry Johnson 

Ice Cream Stand, ca. 1939 – 42 

Gouache, ink, and pencil on paper. 

The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Bob Thompson 

Untitled, 1960-61 

Oil on canvas 

The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts 

© Estate of Bob Thompson; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Drawn primarily from the ground-breaking collection assembled by Harriet and Harmon Kelley over nearly three decades, Something to Say presents more than 50 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs by a wide range of 20th- and 21st-century artists. Featuring masterpieces by such iconic figures as Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Horace Pippin, and Charles White, the exhibition and its related programs allow visitors to reflect upon a broad range of African American experiences, and examines the ways different African American artists have expressed personal, political, and racial identity over approximately 100 years. The exhibition empowers the visitor to appreciate multiple perspectives through various artistic expressions. Something to Say therefore exemplifies the McNay’s commitment to equity, inclusion, and social consciousness as well as artistic excellence.

Stanley Whitney 

Untitled, 2014 

Gouache on paper

Collection of the McNay Art Museum 

© Stanley Whitney; Courtesy of the artist and the McNay Art Museum 

Titus Kaphar 

Letters Never Read, 2017 

Oil and tar on canvas 

Collection of Guillermo Nicolas and Jim Foster. 

© Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Throughout the development and planning of Something to Say, the McNay has sought the insights and perspectives of many community members. The exhibition’s Community Committee includes Harriet Kelley, Guillermo Nicolas, Freda Facey, and Veronique LeMelle; additional partners across San Antonio help further inform the exhibition and promote reflection, dialogue, and creativity within the larger community.

The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
www.mcnayart.org

Stanley Whitney @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Stanley Whitney: Drawings
Lisson Gallery, New York
8 September – 21 October 2017

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York is the first major presentation of his drawings, highlighting important works from 1989 to the present. Stanley Whitney’s works on paper are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color.

Stanley Whitney’s signature format revolves around his use of a loose grid and it is within his sketchbooks and drawings that Whitney works through the abstract structure of colored blocks and lines, testing combinations, arrangements, density and transparency of colors to evoke a sense of rhythm and cadence. 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.” (*)

In Stanley Whitney’s work, color functions as both the design, creating shape and arrangement, and also as the energy, simultaneously attracting and distracting from the color laid beside it. The colors are meant to be seen next to and in relation to the others, rather than as individual blocks. While the drawings and paintings share the importance of space and sequencing of hue — and the gesture of the paintings maintain a sketching quality with the deliberate presence of the artist’s hand — the works on paper do not adhere to a square format as the paintings do. Instead, they tend to fill the rectangular page. Thus, by their format alone the drawings allow for an entirely fresh approach to the grid and pose a different challenge to creating the desired ‘call and response’ between colors. They incorporate a wider variety of color and texture — Whitney uses mediums including colored pencil, graphite, acrylic marker and crayon on surfaces as varied as Indian paper, Japanese rice papers and cardboard.

In his early drawings Whitney experiments with space in a freer format, with marks that are gestural and loose and the areas of color or space between horizontals are sparse and circular. Following a visit to Italy and Egypt in the early 1990s, he begins to experiment with the density of the color within the structure, as inspired by the classical and ancient architecture of the regions. Building these blocks of color, stacked on top of one another across the horizontal lines, the structure becomes more organized and the grids more precise and angular over the following decades.

To accompany the exhibition, the gallery has published a facsimile of one of Whitney’s sketchbooks, illustrating his working process and the way in which he orchestrates shape and color.   

(*) Stanley Whitney, “Stanley Whitney in conversation with Lowery Stokes Sims,” Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2015), 60.

STANLEY WHITNEY

Stanley Whitney was born in 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, Temple University. Having developed his unique grid format in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Whitney’s work evokes a constant rhythm and profound lyricism deeply inspired by music, and drawing influences from sources as vast as Egyptian architecture and Italian cityscapes to textiles and the Gee’s Bend Quilts. Whitney's works featured in a major solo exhibition ‘Dance the Orange’, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA (2015), and he has been included in many prominent group shows such as Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017), ‘Nero su Bianco’ at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (2015); ‘Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract’, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, USA (2014); ‘Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s’, Cheim & Read, New York (2013) and ‘Utopia Station’ at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). He has won prizes including the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. Whitney was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in May 2017. Whitney’s work is included in public collections such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. This marks his third exhibition at Lisson Gallery, and his first in the New York location. 

LISSON GALLERY, NEW YORK
138 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
www.lissongallery.com

Stanley Whitney: Paintings @ Lisson Gallery, Milan

Stanley Whitney: Paintings
Lisson Gallery, Milan
2 October – 13 November 2015

The American artist Stanley Whitney makes his debut with Lisson Gallery Milan, in the country whose influence has proved vital in his five decade-long career. This exhibition includes new paintings and works on paper alongside earlier pieces by Whitney, a painter who is devoted to exploring the spatial, emotional and philosophical thrills of colour and whose canvases sing with a jostling vibrancy that renews the potency of abstraction.

Stanley Whitney’s signature style – developed in the 1990s following time spent in Italy, where he continues to have a studio, and then Egypt – is an almost architectural approach to painting in which a grid composition supports lozenge-like squares, stacking single colours in a deliberately irregular grid. This combinatory improvisation, made possible through the repetition and subtle variation of a predetermined structure, has its musical counterpart in jazz, an abiding influence for Stanley Whitney, and allows for a rhythmic and lyrical space to be created. “Colour has always been about space for me,” the artist recently explained: “how could one create space in the colour on a grid? How could I lay two colours so close to each other and not trap them but rather allow air for the canvas to breathe?”

The vibrancy of Stanley Whitney’s solution, what the critic Peter Schjeldahl has termed the “flustering magnetism of the colour abstractions”, fuses influences as diverse as Morandi, Goya, Velázquez and Guston with poetry, literature and music – snippets of which supply the evocative titles of the paintings. While his works seem to address all the senses at once, Whitney’s painted elements are not held in equilibrium but rather seem to jar and elbow one another. This conflagration, evoked through layered saturated primary, secondary and tertiary hues, at once destabilizes the Modernist grid and describes a beauty that refuses to be stilled.

LISSON GALLERY, MILAN
Via Zenale 3, 20123 Milan
www.lissongallery.com