Mac Whitney—Sculptures from the 1970s

March 8–May 17, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, March 8, 5:00-7:00 pm

Essay by Susie Kalil

For over a half century, the monumental sculptures of Mac Whitney have conjured a profound identification and magnetic power on all who engage them. Working without assistants or fabricators, his hands-on approach to metal makes poetry out of industry. Few sculptors have imbued raw steel with new life as magically as Whitney. Every fold, hollow, plane and bulge is given lively form, producing a sense of dynamism, as if the inert material were pulsating with metaphysical energy. For decades, his 50-foot high, 50,000-pound welded steel construction, painted fire engine red, has loomed alongside a stretch of Houston's I-10 corridor with the force of a thunderbolt.

Writing about the monumental works for a 2001 exhibition at Pillsbury Peters Fine Art, Dallas, the esteemed dealer, curator and former museum director Edmund P. Pillsbury described Whitney as "the foremost abstract sculptor in Texas and arguably one of the region's most accomplished living artists." Experience taught Whitney an essential point—that sculpture is an engineering problem, one that deals with manipulating or defying the constraints of gravity. In Whitney's sculptures, the surfaces are pierced, pitted, channeled or intertwined so the whole looks like multiples in a writhing embrace or whirling dance. Every alignment, every lyrical hairpin curve speaks of aesthetic decision. Industrial components are almost invisibly but flexibly joined together. Currents ebb and flow from one surface to another, thus unleashing the hidden life held within the form.

Distilled, self-assured, historically conscious without being mannered, the sculptures derive their strength from the artist's personal mechanics and intuitive vocabulary he has gradually built up over the years. Each vibrates. As in the best jazz compositions, they are works of the inspired instant, approximating the freely drawn swiftness of calligraphy. As vehicles for negative space, Whitney's sculptures evoke those by David Smith, which allow emptiness to seep in—not so much displacing space as defining and activating it. Whitney also shares a similar penchant for primitive sources and "drawing" in space. The works reference, as well, the lyrical impulses of Alexander Calder and George Rickey. Moreover, the juxtaposition of curvilinear and angular elements belongs to the same tradition as Mark di Suvero's expanded view of sculpture from something that inhabits and intersects with space on a grand scale. Yet Whitney, always a loner, was never a part of any movement. To that end, he refused to valorize the art object over "blue collar" labor.

Although Whitney lived in Texas since 1969, he grew up on a Kansas hog farm and later worked on huge oil field pressure tanks in a boiler factory. In the use of steel as form and primary material, Whitney's process-oriented sculptures bring to mind not-so-distant times when tinkering, basic craftsmanship and resourcefulness were necessities of daily life. For all its dynamic facility, Whitney's art has a tenacious Midwest connection that runs back to childhood experiences of sleds, silos, John Deere tractors and rusted farm equipment. That sense of American Spirit—a freeing of the spatial imagination—strikes an exuberant balance between raw found material and humanly formed artifact.

Nowhere are Whitney's special gifts more evident than in the free-flowing sculptures of plate steel produced during the mid 1970s, a period when he lived and worked in Dallas among the fiercely independent Oak Cliff artists. Kirk Hopper Fine Art is honored to present twenty of the robust works that reveal Whitney's early mental and physical capacities to stretch, reach and explore the fabric of a free-standing form through the richly corrosive texture of aging metals.

Industrial and organic, inside and outside, mechanical and sexual, passive and aggressive, functionalism and poetic license are just a few oppositions which the sculptures manage to blend in surprising ways. As a group, they recapitulate memory, audacious formal rigor and hard manual labor, while also giving viewers the artist's sense of surface, texture, space and surprise at the perception of solid and void. Whitney was far from a finish fetishist, but we can't resist touching, even caressing the configurations of smooths planes and tough "skin." To walk around them in the gallery is to sense a reflex we may not have felt so clearly before—pull, sensuousness, illusion, but also insecurity, risk and danger. Component parts take on a fierce internal energy—things come out of things, pushing, nudging, linking their outer parts. In Whitney's hands, a wavy line becomes personal, what he once compared to "slamming a brand on a steer." Here, line becomes plane, only to transubstantiate into a scribble of smooth and jagged lines again.

At KHFA, this unprecedented gathering of Whitney's sculptures bridges the gap between two dimensional drawing and three dimensional structure. The metaphorical objects claim space while fleetingly suggesting landscape elements, a dance of abstract shapes animated by gritty and saturated color, or as casually drawn as distant plains. The raw or burnished metal reflects its surroundings as a way to integrate color and form. Move around Whitney's sculptures and watch how the characteristics change with the light of day. The slightest shift and they yield a dazzling array of complex, tactile facets now multiplied in the play of reflected light, a constant state of tension between abstract concept and natural form.

One's response to the sculptures certainly has something to do with the care and fine-tuning that Whitney put into them. And therein lies Whitney's fearless power—to temper the unyielding brutality of his medium with the intimacy of human touch.