Stanley Whitney at Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street

Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. The artist has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s.
The exhibition presents a series of what he calls “Afternoon Paintings”: works characterised by a smaller scale and a relaxed, reflective mode.
On top of their spontaneous nature these works reveal Whitney’s dedication to his “practice”, which he likens to athletic training or the “wood-shedding” that jazz musicians refer to when describing their time spent honing their improvisatory skills behind closed doors.