In Conversation: Ellen Gallagher and Richard Shiff on ‘Jack Whitten. I AM THE OBJECT’

On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Jack Whitten. I AM THE OBJECT’ at 542 West 22nd Street, we joined artist Ellen Gallagher and professor Richard Shiff in discussing Whitten’s paintings of the 1990s: their innovation and their motivating sources–from prehistory, to the ancient and modern Mediterranean, to ancient and modern Africa, to tragedies personal and collective, to the most speculative branches of contemporary science and philosophy.

During the 1990s, Jack Whitten created paintings as arrays of bits of hardened acrylic, his “tesserae.” He referred to these elements of color and light as “digital,” alluding to his interest in electronic imaging as well as the quantum or particle theories of advanced physics. In Whitten’s agile hands, the technology and the science generated an art sensitive to the racial politics affecting his generation, yet imbued with spirit, or soul, transcending the moment.

About Ellen Gallagher
Drawing on the ostinato architecture of jazz, the social experimentation of science fiction and the syntax of Minimalism and Conceptualism, Ellen Gallagher has created a body of work over almost three decades that transforms found figurative imagery and abstract forms into what the writer Greg Tate has called “chiaroscuro roadmaps,” charting the maze of postmodern representation, race, beauty and belonging.

Over a highly multifaceted career, Gallagher’s work has been united by what she calls a “jitter”, an intellectual approach in which aesthetic possibilities are shook loose from seismic cracks beneath the surface of cultural entities normally thought to be unshakable and impermeable.

Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Liquid Intelligence’, WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2019), ‘Are We Obsidian?’, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL (2018), ‘Nu-Nile’, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2018), ‘AxME’ at Tate Modern, London (2013) which toured to Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere (2014) and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); ‘Ice or Salt’, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2013); ‘Don’t Axe Me’, New Museum, New York (2013); ‘An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity’, South London Gallery, London (2009); ‘Coral Cities’, Tate Liverpool (2007), travelling to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin (2007); ‘DeLuxe’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005); ‘Murmur and DeLuxe’, MOCA, Miami (2005); and ‘Ichthyosaurus’, The Freud Museum, London (2005).

Gallagher’s work was selected for the 2003 and 2015 Venice Biennale. In 2000, she was awarded the American Academy Award in Art.

About Richard Shiff
Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin. He publishes frequently on modern and contemporary art. His book of eleven essays on Donald Judd appeared earlier in 2020 under the title Sensuous Thoughts. In 2017, he curated an exhibition of Jack Whitten’s work of the 1980s for Hauser & Wirth (London). In 2018, he contributed an essay for the catalogue of Whitten’s sculpture retrospective. His involvement with Whitten’s art of the 1990s represents his third and most comprehensive attempt to deal with the motivations and implications of the artist’s amazingly innovative body of work.

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Hauser & Wirth is an international contemporary and modern art gallery with spaces in Zurich, London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Gstaad and St. Moritz.

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