Blair Whiteford
Matthew Brown is pleased to present Garden of Infinite Foundation, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Blair Whiteford. This marks Whiteford’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first major solo presentation in New York. His most diverse body of work to date, the 20 paintings span a vast range of scale and palette, fuse landscape, portraiture, and abstraction, and illustrate his ongoing engagement with the history of painting as a site of reflection and reinvention.
Whiteford’s paintings begin with swaths of watercolor poured onto the canvas’s surface. This process—reminiscent of the New York Abstract Expressionists—creates a fluidity governed by gravity and the artist’s hand. Whiteford then builds layers of color using translucent glazes of oil paint in the tradition of Old Master painting. By marrying these methods drawn across time, the results are grounded in a technical discipline that balances improvisation and control.
Thematically, the work navigates the complex territory between homage and innovation: through subtle allusions, Whiteford reinterprets the canon without being bound by it. Drawing inspiration from El Greco’s ethereal, mountainous landscapes, to Frankenthaler’s luminous and translucent fields of color, Whiteford creates a visual language of his own.
In a monumental 13-foot canvas titled History of Transaction as it Relates to the Sea, reds, blues, browns, yellows and purples flow through densely poured layers of thinned-out paint and meticulous brushwork to merge figuration and landscape. While undulating gestures evoke a connection to agrarian growth—spanning earth, sea, and sky—the fluid composition imbues a primordial, elemental energy, echoing Whiteford's exploration of the links between physical and metaphysical concepts.
Through the layering of art historical references and techniques, Whiteford places himself in conversation with modernity’s cyclical relationship to history: just as the modernists reacted to their historical moment, Whiteford responds to the current, embracing both tradition and innovation. His work offers a meditation on the ongoing evolution of painting, suggesting that modernity is not a fixed point in time but a continual process of reinterpretation, where the past is constantly resurfacing in the present.
Blair Whiteford (b. 1990, New York) lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2019 and BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2013.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include An Episode of Wind, Pond Society, Shanghai (2023); A Hand That Utters to the Foot of a God, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); Sowing a Seed in a Field Made of Ash, Jack Barrett, New York (2021); Flesh Beloved, Slipping Window, Union Pacific, London (2019); Hoodwinked, with Rory Rosenberg, Gern en Regalia, New York (2017); Leisure, with Blake Daniels, FRESH Exhibitions, Savannah, GA (2014); and The Nighttime Monument, SO WHAT SPACE, New York (2013).
Recent group exhibitions include PROGRAM, Matthew Brown, New York, NY (2024); The Descendants, WOAW Gallery at K11 Musea, Hong Kong (2023); Made in the Dark, CLEARING, New York (2023); Papertrail, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2023); ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-SIX BILLION STEPS TO THE SUN, Clearing, New York, NY (2022); Supermoon, Clearing, Beverly Hills, CA (2022); Complete Metamorphosis, Super Duchess Gallery, New York (2019); Fratirnete 188, Dwight st., New Haven, CT (2019); Again Always, Yale University, New Haven, CT (2019); You Can Get in and Not do Anything, Yale University, New Haven, CT (2018); Keeper of a Fever, No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2018); Group Show 1, Page Gallery, New York (2016); Flux Hustle, No Holds Barred, New York (2015); What We Saw Made Present, Crossley Gallery, Sarasota, FL (2013).