Wallace Whitney (b. 1969, Boston, MA) lives and works in the Bronx, NY. He received a MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Additionally, Whitney is a co-founder of the pioneering CANADA gallery in the Lower East Side. The artist is represented by Horton Gallery, where he has been featured in a solo exhibition, a group exhibition, and in a solo presentation at The Armory Show, New York.
The unmediated and improvisational quality in Wallace Whitney’s paintings likens each of them to scientific residue or psychic mementos. They serve as witnesses to the gesture, evidence of the body, and as a reaffirmation of the intrinsic materiality of painting. Whitney has inherited a strong gestural sense from artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, yet his disarming, discordant use of color, line, and pictorial depth are evocative of Hans Hofmann or Philip Guston. The artist’s sensitivity to his immediate surroundings and landscape root the works in the moment; from the wash of LaGuardia jet traffic in the sky to the defiantly scarred street trees, flocks of noisy feral parrots, and the outcrops of Bronx bedrock coated in spray paint, Whitney folds these fragments from daily life into formally rich and poetically generous abstract pictures.
Press Mentions:
“Whitney’s paintings are undoubtedly the result of long, contemplative moments of reflection and, as the title [Dream Feed] suggests, bouts of stream of consciousness. And yet, it’s as if every gesture is meant to obliterate as much as accentuate what came before.” - Nana Asfour, “Wallace Whitney, ‘Dream Feed’ ”, Time Out New York, November 1, 2010.
“In addition to the touch, palette and surface that comes with the territory, Whitney’s paintings court a fundamental turbulence of the visual field, a fluidity of boundaries between pictorial components.” – Stephen Maine, “The Big (Juicy) Apple: Three current shows of abstract painterliness,”Artcritical.com, November 2, 2010.
“But while the brassy and more overt gestures Whitney makes dominate the canvases – this is certainly an aesthetic of parry and thrust – there are quieter moments within them as well: drips and globs of paint that leaven the drama. Whitney orchestrates pigment into a kind of harmony, his compositions always seeming resolved, as if they have been brought back from the edge of dissonance into something more contemplative. – James Yood, Artforum, November 2008.
The unmediated and improvisational quality in Wallace Whitney’s paintings likens each of them to scientific residue or psychic mementos. They serve as witnesses to the gesture, evidence of the body, and as a reaffirmation of the intrinsic materiality of painting. Whitney has inherited a strong gestural sense from artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, yet his disarming, discordant use of color, line, and pictorial depth are evocative of Hans Hofmann or Philip Guston. The artist’s sensitivity to his immediate surroundings and landscape root the works in the moment; from the wash of LaGuardia jet traffic in the sky to the defiantly scarred street trees, flocks of noisy feral parrots, and the outcrops of Bronx bedrock coated in spray paint, Whitney folds these fragments from daily life into formally rich and poetically generous abstract pictures.
Press Mentions:
“Whitney’s paintings are undoubtedly the result of long, contemplative moments of reflection and, as the title [Dream Feed] suggests, bouts of stream of consciousness. And yet, it’s as if every gesture is meant to obliterate as much as accentuate what came before.” - Nana Asfour, “Wallace Whitney, ‘Dream Feed’ ”, Time Out New York, November 1, 2010.
“In addition to the touch, palette and surface that comes with the territory, Whitney’s paintings court a fundamental turbulence of the visual field, a fluidity of boundaries between pictorial components.” – Stephen Maine, “The Big (Juicy) Apple: Three current shows of abstract painterliness,”Artcritical.com, November 2, 2010.
“But while the brassy and more overt gestures Whitney makes dominate the canvases – this is certainly an aesthetic of parry and thrust – there are quieter moments within them as well: drips and globs of paint that leaven the drama. Whitney orchestrates pigment into a kind of harmony, his compositions always seeming resolved, as if they have been brought back from the edge of dissonance into something more contemplative. – James Yood, Artforum, November 2008.
Photo: Joplin Steinweiss