For 50 years, Jack Whitten has explored the possibilities of paint, the role of the artist, and the allure of material essence in his innovative studio process. With compositions that are abstract and elegiac, Whitten foregrounds the material properties of paint—pigmentation, viscosity, and mark—to capture the momentary and suggest the enduring.
Jack Whitten could tell a story better than anyone else, remembers Victoria Sung, who worked with the abstract painter on his 2015-2016 retrospective. In commemorating his life and his January 20 passing, she writes that she finds herself "drawn to those narratives that punctuated the space in between his canvases."
Allegories: The Memorial Paintings of Jack Whitten
“Through memory we reconstruct our past," says Jack Whitten. “We honor the dead through memory.” Motivated by this idea, Whitten created a series of paintings honoring key people and events in his life and in American culture, from Lena Horne to MLK, the 9/11 attacks to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that occurred three years ago today. Here, a look at 13 of Whitten's memorial paintings.
"As an abstract painter, I work with things that I cannot see," says Jack Whitten. "Google has mapped the whole earth. We have maps of Mars. We don't have a map of the soul, and that intrigues me." Here the painter discusses Soul Map (2015), a large-scale acrylic collage on view in the exhibition Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting.
