FreedmanArt is pleased to present The Nature of This Place, an exhibition of paintings by Kit White, opening Tuesday, March 21, 2017. From 5:30pm to 7:30pm, FreedmanArt will host a reception and a book signing with the artist to celebrate the release of the new monograph by Carter Ratcliff, Kit White: Line Into Form.
Kit White is a New York based painter. He studied fine arts at Harvard
University and his work, beginning in 1977, has been the subject of numerous
one-person exhibitions and group shows. He is the recipient of the Louis
Comfort Tiffany Award, was a visiting artist at the American Academy in
Rome, and a visiting artist at Civitella Ranieri, where he later returned as Guest
Director. In 2012, MIT Press published his book 101 Things to Learn in Art
School, which has now been translated into eight languages. White has lectured
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. He is currently a
professor of painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He is married to
the writer Andrea Barnet.
In a recent statement, the artist wrote:
“My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air.”
With these words, Walt Whitman described the aura of
place that has haunted American culture from its inception... Part
myth, part reality, the nature of this place has formed us, challenged
us and provided the conflicts that we still engage. Wilderness to tame
and revere, garden to cultivate and exploit, space to nurture a sense of
freedom but subdue our arrogance with the sublime; all of these and
the contradictions they embrace, have provided a continuous
backdrop to our underlying collective sense of self. […] It has made
me wonder at the ways the world instructs us, inculcates us and trains
our senses to intuit what lies beneath the surface of things; those
things which, as Walter Percy wrote, “we know or have experienced
but for which we do not have a name.”
FreedmanArt’s exhibition will include paintings as well as works on
paper from the past two decades of White’s career, dating from the mid-1990s
up to 2017. Many of these works are reproduced in the 200-page, fully
illustrated monograph by Carter Ratcliff, Kit White: Line Into Form, published
in 2016 by Foliart Publishers. In his thorough essay that follows the shifts in
White’s career, Ratcliff aptly asserts: “White lays out paths for the eye.” A
constant through White’s practice—while his paintings’ use of color, space, and
figure/ground relationships undergo various changes—is his use of gestural line
and mark to bring the viewer into the present of the painting. Ratcliff situates
the work fully in its own moment, but explains: “We cannot locate White in his
era by tracing influences. Yet there are affinities to be noted. In Philip
Guston, for instance, he has long seen an important predecessor.”
Carter Ratcliff is a well known New York poet, critic and author. He has written
monographs on John Singer Sargent, Georgia O'Keefe, Francis Bacon, Andy
Warhol, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Pat Steir, as well as The Fate of Gesture:
Jackson Pollock and Post War American Art (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996), Out
of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975 (Allworth Press, 2001), among
many others. His most recent book of poetry is Arrivederci, Modernismo
(Libellum, 2007). His first novel, Tequila Mockingbird (Station Hill) was
published in 2015 to very favorable reviews. Mr. Ratcliff has taught art history
and theory at New York University and Hunter College and has lectured widely
at universities and colleges throughout the United States and Europe.