Stanley Whitney (b. 1946, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a leading American painter whose loosely gridded, densely colored canvases have expanded the language of contemporary abstraction, treating the grid not as a rigid structure but as something closer to a musical score.

Whitney earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1968 and an MFA from Yale in 1972, then moved to New York, where he spent the 1970s and 1980s in close dialogue with the city's jazz clubs and downtown scene, searching for a structure flexible enough to hold color without pinning it down, a question that occupied him for decades before his mature format arrived. In 1992 he and his wife, the painter Marina Adams, relocated to Rome for a period, folding Italian light and architecture into a practice already steeped in Mondrian, Morandi, and the improvisational logic of jazz and American quilting.