Whitney Hagen, the Newport painter of hard edges and imagined spaces, is bringing her first European solo show to Venice in two suitcases.
I had never seen anyone absorb the influence of the masters so quickly. Hilla Rebay and Kandinsky, in a painter this young? The press release for Whitney Hagen’s Chromatic Conditions, her first solo show in Europe, at the Castello 925 annex in Venice, calls the works “abstract 21st-century icons” that “glow like prisms for another world.” Her own statement speaks of “harmony, tension, emotion, and balance,” which is Kandinsky’s vocabulary almost word for word.
So I asked her. Do you think of these as icons? “Short answer no,” she said. She admires Rebay and Kandinsky, but she doesn’t load her own work with their weight. What she describes is quieter and stranger: small wood panels, some stacked, each a still image from a larger imagined space. She sketches in ballpoint on scrap paper, refines the design on an iPad, then transfers it to the panel in colored pencil. Everything she brought to Venice, none of it larger than twelve inches square, traveled in two hardshell suitcases.
By day, Hagen is lead preparator at the Newport Art Museum, which is why she hung the Venice show herself. The newest work is already outgrowing the suitcases, at 20 by 20 and 30 by 30 inches, and her palette is widening to include pink. Here she talks about the lineage she does and doesn’t claim, the water that keeps surfacing in her colors, and what comes next. “I paint because I have to,” she says. Read More: https://bit.ly/ccatchhagen
