Jack Whitten
The American painter Jack Whitten (1939-2018) grows up in Alabama and settles in New York in the early 1960s, where he experiments with dynamic, expressive works that are closely related content-wise to the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Under the influence of photography, his work becomes increasingly more abstract, and is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in the mid-1970s, at a time in history when it seems almost unlikely that the museum elite would ever collect an Afro-American artist. During the 1980s, Whitten discovers the possibilities of acrylic paint, which he applies on his canvases with spatulas and combs to obtain a tangible surface texture. Figuration and colour make way for complete abstraction. Lines, triangles and faded patterns dominate his canvases. Whitten radically embraces abstraction, unlike many of his Afro-American colleagues who often utilise narrative and didactic tactics. From that attention to texture, he gradually seeks to integrate notions of sculpture and collage, and realises elaborated sculpture-paintings, constructed in paint, supplemented with tile patterns and mosaic, in a way reminiscent of murals and architecture.
Text: Hans Willemse
Translations: Michael Meert