JACK WHITTEN: The Numinous

Dexter!, 1990

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce The Numinous, an exhibition of Jack Whitten’s paintings and works on paper from the 1980s, in Los Angeles.

September 30, 2026 — January 10, 2027

After a 1980 house fire forced an extended pause in his practice, Whitten returned with renewed urgency. Testing and pushing acrylic paint to new effects, he began to treat the medium as a dense, malleable material—something that could be cut, layered and collaged like ‘a skin.’ Another turning point came in 1983, when The Studio Museum in Harlem presented a survey of Whitten’s work from 1970 – 1980, organized by longtime supporter Henry Geldzahler.

For Whitten, meaning was embedded in matter itself. He described soul as a ‘molecular’ force of thought and feeling that preceded culture and ideology. This force was itself a source of wonder—or, as the title of the exhibition suggests, numinosity. Likening light in his paintings to John Coltrane’s use of sound, Whitten believed that, like jazz, ‘painting elicits the presence of the soul.’ ‘Soulspace’ was therefore not only a metaphor. It was a proposition that painting could make the invisible perceptible.

Site #4, 1986

On view in the exhibition, more than a dozen Site works on paper, created through a range of experimental processes and material interventions, evidence the expansion of Whitten’s inquiry into surface and index. In such works as ‘Site #3’ and ‘Site #4,’ the direct transfer of texture onto delicate Japanese paper left little room for revision, making chance and irreversibility part of the act of making.

At a moment when critics declared the death of painting, Whitten expanded what the medium could do. ‘The Numinous’ brings renewed focus to the extraordinary works he made in the 1980s, repositioning this period as a crucial chapter in his practice––one in which his investigations into material, spirit and abstraction coalesced into one of the most original bodies of work in postwar American art.