Stanley Whitney - Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale London Thursday, June 27, 2024 | Phillips

Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale

London Auction 27 June 2024

  • “Well, I don’t start off with any kind of colour idea in my head. I never know. That’s why I use the same format; I can live off of it. Once I put a colour down, that colour will let me know the next colour. Similar to music, you know, how a player can play and then they’ll inform the other player and then they’ll come in. They’ll see space and they’ll think, ‘Okay, I can come into this space.’ It’s a conversation. For me, it really is a colour conversation.”
    —Stanley Whitney

    • Provenance

      Gifted by the artist to the present owner

    • Artist Biography

      Stanley Whitney

      American • 1946

      Inspired by Renaissance painting, Minimalist sculpture and jazz music, Stanley Whitney’s oeuvre has become central to the current discourse of abstract painting in the contemporary era. Following recent solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the 72-year-old artist has only just received the critical acclaim he deserves. After moving to New York from Philadelphia at the age of 22, Whitney aligned himself with the Color Field painters, often working in the shadows of his contemporaries including Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Throughout the decades that followed, however, the artist soon established himself as a key player in 20th century abstraction, traveling the world and gaining recognition not only in the studio, but also in the classroom, where he has taught Painting and Drawing at the Tyler School of Art for over 30 years. As such, Whitney’s influence extends to a generation of new artists exploring the formal tenants of painting today.

      As Lauren Haynes, curator of Whitney’s solo show at the Studio Museum in 2015, aptly wrote, “Whitney’s work interrogates the connections among colors, how they lead to and away from one another, what memories they are associated with…Whitney’s colors take on lives of their own. They evoke memory and nostalgia. This orange takes you back to your favorite childhood t-shirt; that blue reminds you of your grandmother’s kitchen. Whitney’s paintings remind us, on a universal scale, of the ability of color to trigger feelings and sensations.”

      View More Works

Property of a Private Collection

62

Stanley Whitney

Untitled

signed and dated 'Stanley Whitney 2003' on the reverse
oil on linen
30.5 x 30.7 cm (12 x 12 1/8 in.)
Painted in 2003.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 ‡

Sold for £40,640

Contact Specialist

Louise Simpson
Associate Specialist
+44 7887 473 568
lsimpson@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale

London Auction 27 June 2024