The Easel

Stanley Whitney’s Machine for Painting

Whitney’s paintings have been called ‘portals into colour’. His first museum show in 2015 brought greater attention to his signature grids – saturated colour fields separated by horizontal bands. Whitney admits a debt to other artists – notably Velazquez – but the end results are completely his: “stacks of rectangles seemingly supported by horizontal, shelf-like stripes … compositions [that] are like a liquid Rubik’s cube.”