Stanley Whitney: Jazz, Grids and His First Asian Solo Show

Description

Titled after a 1936 Duke Ellington standard, Gagosian’s Isn’t Love the Strangest Thing frames Stanley Whitney’s paintings as visual jazz: improvisational, rhythmic and built on call-and-response between colours. Ranging from 30- to 180cm squares, the paintings invite an immersive meditation on time, memory and the sensory origins of colour.

His debut solo show in Asia presents compositions that unfold across loose grids of rectangular fields separated by gestural bands, where each block functions independently yet harmonises with the whole, echoing jazz legends Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. Alongside jazz, the work nods to Black Southern quilt making, the banded linear patterns of ancient Greek vase painting, and Abstract Expressionist artists such as Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko in its banded, linear patterning and meditative use of colour.

Born in 1946 in Pennsylvania and trained at Yale, Whitney has refined a singular abstract language since the 1990s, especially after transformative years in Rome that softened his grids and expanded his painterly gesture. Represented by Gagosian since 2022, he now brings new and recent works — including entries from his Roma and Stay Song series.

On 10 September, the opening reception will be held between 18:00 and 20:00.