Artist: Jack Whitten

Following the late artist’s critically acclaimed 2025 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Downtown Los Angeles gallery presents an exhibition of Jack Whitten’s paintings and works on paper from the 1980s, a decade of decisive experimentation and evolution in his pioneering six‑decade career.

After a studio fire in 1980 forced an extended pause, Whitten resumed artmaking with heightened urgency, his relentless technical ambition now inseparable from a fierce commitment to painting as spiritual transmission. This exhibition charts the breakthroughs of this pivotal period in the artist’s journey via the Soulspace paintings and circular acrylic reliefs that reference celestial navigation; the pixel-like grids on canvas that anticipate his tesserae works; and the Site paintings cast from such urban textures as manhole covers and tire treads, shown alongside frottage works on paper.

Together these reveal an artist whose utterly original transfiguration of abstraction—his integration of daring material invention with expressions of Black identity and animist spirituality—remains central to the history of postwar American art.