Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971–1973
Rose Art Museum
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA
The exhibition is Whitten's first one person exhibition in New England, and features several never-before exhibited monumental canvases of the early 1970s.
For Whitten, 1970 marked what he calls a “time of reckoning” in his painting, a decisive moment when he erased the hand of the past and moved into his own present. Whitten began a course of experiments with paint that expanded the scale of painting on canvas. Gesture was removed; the paint and canvas were "processed”, produced through large troughs of paint dragged across the canvas with tools including squeegees, rakes, and combs.
In addition to Whitten’s monumental works, the exhibition includes experimental drawing studies and small works on canvas made with slices of dried acrylic paint, among the first collages ever made using paint.
