Vente: 540 / Evening Sale 09 juin 2023 à Munich Lot 56

 

56
Stanley Whitney
Untitled, 2017.
Oil on canvas
Estimation:
€ 60,000 / $ 64,800
Résultat:
€ 76,200 / $ 82,296

( frais d'adjudication compris)
Untitled. 2017.
Oil on canvas.
Signed, dated and inscribed with a direction arrow and "TOP" on the reverse. Inscribed "1-2017 SMP" on the folded canvas and "170149" on the stretcher. 30.5 x 30.5 cm (12 x 12 in).

• Whitney's delivers proof of a strong effect in a small format.
• In a particularly rare color scheme.
• The artist's small-sized works were made as an entirely independent work group parallel to his large paintings.
• The year the work was made, Whitney participated in documenta 14 in Kassel.
• In 2022, the renowned Gagosian Gallery signed the artist.
• The Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, will show a first grand retrospective in 2024
.

PROVENANCE: Lisson Gallery, New York.
Private collection Switzerland (acquired from the above).


"I thought, well, can I make a great painting small? Because I'm always thinking about where things will go, what I might do [..]. The studio is really a place where I can really see lots of possibilities."

Stanley Whitney, 2022, in an interview for Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico, https://youtu.be/N1chLqIdYzQ

Since the early 1990s, the painter has devoted himself to a very specific formal composition, the characteristic, recurring grid structures, which he gradually fills with strong, saturated lined up blocks of color. In addition, the canvases are always structured by three to five horizontal bands of color.

Despite this given structure, Whitney's painting is anything but rigid and does not follow any confining order. “The color makes the structure. [..] I wanted a system that allowed me to lay color down when I felt like it - I wanted nothing to get in my way. When I start these paintings I have no idea what it's going to be. I don't start with a sketch or an idea.” (Stanley Whitney in a talk with Arunda D'Souza, May 30, 2017, quoted from: www.artnews.com/art-news/news/the-color-makes-the-structure-stanley-whitney-paints-a-picture-8418/).

Whitney works his way from the top left corner to the bottom right, block by block and row by row. In the present work, vertically and horizontally "stacked" color fields form a dynamic and rhythmic composition. Similar to the artist's large-format works, this work also emanates a fascinating liveliness which the artist achieved through clearly structured horizontal stripes and squares, the partly merging surfaces, the clear brushmarks that tell the observer about the process of creation and a paint application in varying degrees of opacity.

For many years, Stanley Whitney's impressive artistic work was met with surprisingly little attention. However, that would change with his participation in documenta 14 in Kassel in the year the present work was made. In the following, his works were subject of solo shows at, among others, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth (2017) and the Palazzo Tiepolo in Venice (2022). The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in Buffalo, New York is planning to host a first comprehensive retrospective of his work in 2024. [CH]



56
Stanley Whitney
Untitled, 2017.
Oil on canvas
Estimation:
€ 60,000 / $ 64,800
Résultat:
€ 76,200 / $ 82,296

( frais d'adjudication compris)