For the Venice Biennale 2022, Stanley Whitney will open an exhibition at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, from 23 April – 27 November 2022, presented by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Co-curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Vincenzo de Bellis, Curator and Associate Director of Programs, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, the exhibition marks the first time that Whitney will present works that have exclusively been created in Italy—from early works dating to the pivotal years he spent in Rome, to paintings made during subsequent summers spent in his studio near Parma throughout the last three decades.

The presentation will gather examples from thirty years of Whitney’s acclaimed ‘Italian Paintings,’ many painted in his studio near Parma, Italy, as well as a number of the artist’s Italian sketchbooks. While Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within evershifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over gestural fields since the mid-1970s, he spent a formative period living in Italy in the 1990s where he was absorbed by Roman art and architecture. That experience triggered a paradigm shift that fundamentally changed the structure of his paintings. Whitney has kept a studio outside Parma since that time and the pace of life in that region became a key, albeit underrecognized part of his creative practice—Italy and Italian art and architecture continued to have a profound influence on his work.