Jack Whitten

🔳🗿Jack Whitten (December 5, 1939 – January 20, 2018) was an American abstract painter.

Starting in the early ’70s, Whitten engineered new extrapolations on Abstract Expressionism. 

For a series known as the “Slab” works, Whitten utilized an unconventional process for which he would lay the canvas on the floor, drag a squeegee across to mix his color, and then let the paint dry. 

Paint was piled on as much as a quarter-inch thick in many of them, and all of the tones Whitten chose were left visible. With their warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries, they resemble long-exposure photographs of things in motion.

In later works, Whitten came up with a mosaic-like method for applying paint. He would let acrylic dry, crack it into squarish chips, and then combine it to conjure images of people and objects that were important to him. 

By the end of his career, Whitten had started exploring digital technology, creating works such as Apps for Obama (2011), which might be considered a vision of Barack Obama’s iPad. The painting made use of Whitten’s beloved acrylic chips—an age-old technique that was here rendered new. 

“I want a worldview that will teach me how to conduct myself in this new world order,” he told ARTnews

Current exhibitions: 

Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017, At The Met Breuer, SEPTEMBER 6–DECEMBER 2, 2018

More: Instagram