For the past five decades, Alabama-born, Tribeca based abstractionist Jack Whitten has been experimenting with a body work that has vied with the aesthetics of Ab-Ex while conceptually drawing on both the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the greater Civil Rights Movement even stretching to the Bauhaus.
Under-recognized for the majority of his career, Whitten’s complex process has been attracting attention lately with major exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 organized by Independent Curators International, and P.S. 1 / MoMA Center for Contemporary Art. This month, Whitten’s Pink Psyche Queen (1973), a painting that pre-dates Richter’s Abstraktes Bild series that have achieved extraordinary prices at auction of late, graces the cover of Artforum.
Through lengthy trials, Whitten developed an artistic process that included aspects of both photography and print-making as he utilized large troughs full of paint through which he dragged canvas with sticks, rakes, and Afro-combs relinquishing total control and creating an unpredictable tactility. Other historic works utilize acrylic skins (paint physically removed from canvas then re-laid down) as well as intricately compiled tiling featured in Apps for Obama (2011) displayed at Alexander Gray in 2011.