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Stanley Whitney’s Colorful Grids at the Studio Museum

If you’re in New York City between now and October 25, I highly recommend spending some time with Stanley Whitney’s colorful grids at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

The exhibit, titled Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, showcases twenty-eight paintings and works on paper created by Whitney over the past seven years. It marks the (long overdue) first New York City solo museum exhibition of Whitney’s work, which tends toward a “weighty, almost architectural approach” to painting that is evidenced in the title work above.

While I admittedly have a soft spot for colorful grids of all varieties, something I love most about Whitney’s work is its disorder – its constant push against the neat form of the grid. As the Studio Museum notes, that quality is, of course, deliberate:

“Rhythmic and lyrical, with a combination of pre-ordained structure and improvisation inspired in part by his love of jazz, the square-format paintings arrange rectangles of vivid, single colors in a deliberately irregular grid, with the close-fitting, many-hued ‘bricks’ or ‘tiles’ stacked vertically and arrayed in horizontal bands.”

Peter Schjeldahl elaborates:

“The glamour of the work alerts you to an onset of beauty, pending the appropriate feeling and an endorsement in thought. But the juxtapositions and the compositional rhythms of the colors, jarring ever so slightly, won’t resolve into unity. What’s going on? Does the artist aim at order and miss, or does he try, and fail, to destroy it? It’s as if you can’t quite get started looking, but you can stop only by force of will. The paintings deny you the relief of disappointment. At length, beauty does arrive, though clad in its judicial robes, as truth. Your desire and its frustration, impartially sustained, are ruled the work’s subject.”

If you make it over, let me know what you think in the comments below.