Jack Whitten – The Numinous

HAUSER & WIRTH Los Angeles, 901-909 East 3rd Street, 90013, Los Angeles

September 30, 2026 – January 10, 2027

Following Jack Whitten's critically acclaimed 2025 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, this exhibition presents paintings and works on paper from the 1980s—a decade of decisive experimentation in his pioneering six-decade career. After a studio fire in 1980 forced an extended pause, Whitten resumed artmaking with heightened urgency, his technical ambition inseparable from commitment to painting as spiritual transmission. The exhibition charts breakthroughs via Soulspace paintings and circular acrylic reliefs referencing celestial navigation; pixel-like grids anticipating tesserae works; and Site paintings cast from urban textures like manhole covers and tire treads, alongside frottage works on paper. Together these reveal an artist whose original transfiguration of abstraction—integrating daring material invention with expressions of Black identity and animist spirituality—remains central to postwar American art history.