“I don’t have stylistic concerns in terms of formality. The point I want to make with painting is that abstraction, as we know it, can be directed towards the specifics of subject – a person, a thing, an experience. My goal is to use painting to build abstraction as symbol”
Executed in 1985, Dutch Treat #1 exemplifies Jack Whitten’s pioneering experimentation with material, process, and perception during the mid-1980s - a pivotal period in which the artist redefined the possibilities of abstract painting. Using a self-invented vocabulary of tessellated acrylic “tiles,” Whitten constructed a mosaic-like surface that simultaneously evokes digital circuitry and ancient fresco. Each tiny cell, individually cast and meticulously embedded, captures light in a unique way, creating a rhythmic interplay of color and reflection that animates the entire composition. Recently honored with a monumental retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, Jack Whitten is the subject of immense critical interest for his career-long investigations of mapping, messaging, and memory through abstraction.
Jack Whitten: An Artist's Life | Art21 "Extended Play"
Dutch Treat #1 reflects Whitten’s ongoing quest to merge painting with sculpture, and to translate memory and emotion into material form. The grid structure serves as both framework and field, within which bursts of red, yellow, and blue punctuate the silvery grey ground like fragments of coded information. In its precision and tactility, the work reveals Whitten’s interest in the technological and the spiritual - an exploration of how modern abstraction could hold the weight of history while embracing the future. As the artist wrote, “I am not interested in paint as illusion; I am interested in paint as matter.”
The painting belongs to the same lineage of material innovation that defined Whitten’s career and was celebrated in his 2018–19 retrospective Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed (MoMA, 2023). These landmark exhibitions affirmed Whitten’s position as a bridge between Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and contemporary conceptual practice. His ability to transform pigment into architecture and gesture into structure now places him among the most influential figures in postwar American abstraction.
With its dazzling chromatic rhythm and sculptural surface, Dutch Treat #1 captures Whitten at the height of his technical invention. The work’s luminous tessellation exemplifies his lifelong dialogue between control and chance, intellect and intuition - a painting that embodies not only the evolution of abstraction but the spirit of an artist who expanded its very language.
