Jack Whitten: Prime Mover brings together a group of recently acquired works on paper that Jack Whitten realized during the 1970s using a range of dry and wet black pigments. The year 1970 saw a shift in the artist’s studio methods, with systematic process replacing the gestural abstraction of the previous decade. Moving away from the easel, he started to work horizontally on flat surfaces and employ new tools, materials, and methods of his own design to generate images that dispense with the artist’s hand. In keeping with the language of contemporary technologies, Whitten began using the term “developed,” as opposed to “designed,” to describe his changed approach to image making. Throughout the decade, as this presentation attests, the pulse of experimentation in Whitten’s oeuvre was first felt on paper.

Image:
Jack Whitten, Anomaly #1, 1974. © Jack Whitten Estate. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York