Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s @ the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. Many artists during this era adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing materiality and visual force of painting. At the same historical moment, an emerging generation of artists of color and women explored color’s capacity to ignite new questions about perception, specifically its relation to race, gender, and the coding of space. Spilling Over looks to the divergent ways color can be equally a formal problem and a political statement.

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s is on view through August 18 at the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection @ The Whitney Museum of American Art In New York

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand. Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection will be on view until February 12, 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York

A Sneak Peek Of Frank Stella's Retrospective Exhibition At the Whitney In New York

On October 30th Frank Stella’s major retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The survey marks the first retrospective at the new location and encompasses around 120 works from mid 1950’s to the The entire fifth floor has been taken over by Stella’s large-scale paintings and sculptures, divided by floating walls that mark the different stages in the artist’s career. The 18,000-square-foot gallery is set up as a timeline that starts with Stella’s iconic work Die Fahne Hoch!, from 1959, with which the artist , 23 at the time, marked his rebellion against the strict limitations of Abstract Expressionism. The retrospective impressively manages to reconstruct the different stages in Stella’s practice, emphasizing especially lesser-known pieces made between the 1980’s and 2000’s. It is in this way that the artist’s natural progression into sculptural works unfolds for the visitor, as well as giving a clear understanding of why Stella continuous to call his work paintings. The metal structures, embedded with 3-D printed elements, tower seemingly weightless from the gallery walls and are reminiscent of canvases packed and layered with paint as in the case of “At Sainte Luce!”. It is in these moments that Stella’s personality and unwillingness to confirm to rigid definitions shines through. Frank Stella: A Retrospective will open tomorrow and run until February 7, 2017 at the Whitney, 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs and text by Adriana Pauly

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2012

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Charles Atlas (b. 1949). Still from Turning (live mix) with Antony and the Johnsons, 2004. Image courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—will fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

SHERRIE LEVINE: MAYHEM

Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) has transformed and re-contextualized images and objects in her work since the late 1970s, often presenting them as installations that provide a compelling sense of context. An exhibition at the Whitney in New York, entitled Mayhem, developed as a project by the artist, includes works ranging from well-known photographs, such as After Walker Evans: 1-22, 1981, to recent sculptures, such as Crystal Skull: 1-12, 2010. The exhibition, conceived by the artist as offering constellations of older and newer works, will provide juxtapositions that provoke new associations and responses. The installation will also emphasize the powerfully seductive, tactile nature of Levine’s art, and the complex layers of reference and meaning that unfold between the ostensible sources and Levine’s own work. Sherrie Levine: Mayhem is on view at the Whitney until January 22, 2012.