Jack Whitten

The Great Loop #2

Jack Whitten
The Great Loop #2
2012
Black cat and acrylic on rice paper
66.7 x 97.8 cm / 26 1/4 x 38 1/2 in

Drawing was an integral part of Jack Whitten’s artistic and technical maturation throughout the different phases of his evolution as an artist. Working on paper fundamentally served as means of research, both of ideas and the multidimensionality of vision. As he would later describe in 2014, ‘Drawing is the skeleton of what I do in painting.’ (1)

The distinct impression of string winds across the active surface of ‘The Great Loop #2’, a recurring motif employed by Whitten as early as 1980. Open loops, closed loops, double loops and so on, the artist produced the loop as a three-dimensional gesture as well as an autobiographical symbol and a mapping device. In the artist’s own words, ‘I started in Africa, was brought to the Americas . . . I had to go to Europe . . . back to America + back to Africa . . . In order to get where I am today, therefore, the ‘Loop’ is autobiographical. This explains my present identity . . . I AM GLOBAL! This is why I speak of third stage modernism. I am the third stage, the Loop is my symbol of being.’ (2)

1. Jack Whitten, Studio Log, November 2014.
2. Jack Whitten on 25 March 2012 in Kathy Siegel (ed.), ‘Jack Whitten. Notes from the Woodshed’, Zurich/CH: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018, p. 389.