NEW YORK, NY.- FreedmanArt is presenting The Nature of This Place, an exhibition of paintings by Kit White, which opened March 21, 2017. FreedmanArt also announced the release of the 2016 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.
