Fly the Wild
Fly the Wild is exemplary of Whitney’s vibrant, color-blocked, and music-inspired work from the past twenty-five years. The artist arrived at this particular format in the early 1990s: a square canvas in certain prescribed dimensions, a brightly hued palette, and four lateral bands of rectangular, off-square fields of color bisected by thinner, horizontal stripes in similar shades. Beginning always at the top left corner of the canvas, Whitney applies areas of oil paint and works to the right, then down, taking time to see how each block of color reacts with the next. The results are sumptuous and lyrical hymns to the art of painting and speak to the medium’s history as a field of multisensory or synesthetic possibilities.
Artwork Details
- Title: Fly the Wild
- Artist: Stanley Whitney (American, born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1946)
- Date: 2017
- Medium: Oil on linen canvas
- Dimensions: 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Julie and Jeffrey Loria, 2017
- Object Number: 2017.388
- Rights and Reproduction: © Stanley Whitney
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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