grieve our own,’ adding a very personal note: ‘The passing of Muhammad Ali was extremely painful for me. His raw, primal power channeled through the plasticity of boxing is something I seek in painting.’

Holes, apertures, and coded space are the subject of Whitten’s Spatial Dialogue works. In these paintings forms double as voids in opalescent fields of tessarae. The artist’s engagement with astrophysics and metaphysics informs the series The Folding of Spacetime, in which the titular folds evoke wormholes in deep space, as well as his drawings on evolon, including the series Presence and The Third Entity. Here we see Whitten combining the smudged abstraction and ethereality of his 1964 Head series, with the highly processed effects of his 1970s experiments with Xerox’s dry electrostatic printing technology. The resulting images here have an otherworldly and even hypnotic appearance. Drawing the viewer in, they create doors to other states of consciousness.

The exhibition comes to a thematic head in the 2016 series The Doubt of Being, comprising six tessellated canvases in a gleaming aquatic blue, and Three Stages of Doubt, three grisaille drawings made of Renaissance wax and dry pigment on evolon. In these we find Whitten giving form to the natural predilection for questioning that is so fundamental to artists and scientists; in so doing, he renders paintings with the authority of philosophical inquiry.

About the Artist

Born in Bessemer AL, in 1939, Jack Whitten was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement before moving north to New York City in the early 1960s and enrolling at Cooper Union. He mingled downtown with the Abstract Expressionists, absorbing the in uence of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Klein, and Philip Guston, while engaging uptown with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden. But Whitten would soon prioritize his own distinctly experimental vision, engineering breakthrough after breakthrough with techniques and materials, articulating new pathways between artworks and their inspirations. At times he has pursued quickly applied gestural techniques akin to photography or printmaking. At other times, the deliberative and constructive hand is evident. From his series of small Ghost canvases of the 1960s and subsequent pulled Slabs and dragged canvases of the 1970s, Whitten moved on to collaged acrylic Skins of the 1980s, and eventually to his more recent tessellated constructions – paintings that look like mosaics but are actually composed of dried-acrylic paint chips as tesserae unevenly set in wet paint.

The common denominators across the many phases of Whitten’s artistic practice – which he describes as ‘conceptual’ – are the avidity of his technical explorations and his mastery of abstraction’s potential to map geographic, social, and psychological locations, particularly within the African-American experience. Recalling his time as a pre-medical student at Tuskegee Institute (today Tuskegee University) in the 1950s, he once said, ‘[It was] an all-black college where the African-American scientist George Washington Carver did all his experiments. His laboratory is still intact. He was also a painter. I’m convinced today that a lot of my attitudes toward painting and making, and experimentation came from George Washington Carver. He made his own pigments, his own paints, from his inventions with peanuts. The obsession with invention and discovery impressed me.’