Over the past twenty-five years, Ian Whittlesea’s work has assumed many forms, from paintings and light installations to printed books and ephemera, always exploring the relationships between language, light and image. His ongoing body of work, the White Cloud Forming paintings, are made using only sprayed pigment, without brushes or any direct contact with the support. They are simultaneously a representation of another’s mystical state and entirely abstract records of the process of their own making. His most recent project was inspired by the private collection of Egyptian engineer Sissarrad G. Balyan, a member of the Rosicrucian order (AMORC) in California in the 1950s, whose extensive archive Whittlesea later acquired on eBay and documented in his latest book The Rosicrucian Papers of Sissarrad G. Balyan.

Whittlesea’s work is held in international private and public collections. He has exhibited at the Barbican Centre, London; Tate Modern, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Artists Space, New York; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; BOZAR, Brussels; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Delfina Foundation, London; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Corvi-Mora, London; 1961 Projects, Singapore; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; The Narrows, Melbourne; Canopy Collections, London.