Lennox St. Gallery presents Manifestation, an exhibition of new works by Paris-based artist Anthony White. Marking a new direction for the artist, Manifestation consists of a series of 10 paintings responding to Sidney Nolan’s 1966 Eureka Stockade mural in which White reclaims the painterly gesture as a form of dissent. This is White's third solo show with the gallery, his first in the new space as Lennox St. Gallery and his first body of work made as a response to a single work of art.

White draws on new research into the 1854 Eureka Rebellion (Australia’s only ever armed civil uprising), the personal papers of Sidney Nolan and recent protest events in France, highlighting the increasing importance of his engagement with material, concept and history. Painted in France during a period marked by widespread public protests, these ten new works continue White’s wider thinking around the painterly gesture as a form of dissent, as well as the act of civil disobedience, or, in French, Manifestation – a protest, public event, action, or object which embodies an idea.

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.informality is proud to present The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry by Paris based, Australian artist, Anthony White. The artist’s first solo show in the UK. The exhibition comprises recent work reviewing ideas about civil disobedience and its correlation to contemporary late capitalism. In the exhibition, Anthony White revisits themes of involuntary detention, injustice, migration, and reflects upon the effects of a Western capitalist civilisation in our modern environment.

In his latest work White combines important forms of analogue communication including posters of advertising and musical acts from the Paris metro. Drawing from the urban cultural history of Paris, the artist uses these reversed metro 'affiches' to build the image, tearing, re-cropping and utilising painterly interventions acting as a form of dissent.

The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry utilises materials tagged and altered by anonymous authors which symbolising collectivity in the community and highlights the increased need for collective types of communication, reinforcing the fact that we are interdependent upon one another.

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This year’s 13th International Painting Symposium 'Mark Rothko 2017' taking place in Daugavpils, Latvia, was attended by 10 artists from 10 different countries of the world. From 98 artists’ applications, this year’s participants of the symposium were chosen by a competent international jury.
This unique structured residency at the Mark Rothko Art Centre lets artists participate in a transcultural environment to critically engage with ideas central to the Abstract Expressionist visual arts practice. The symposium provides a space to explore and debate the role and purposes of contemporary art. Participants of the exhibition: Edda Jachens (Germany), Graham Fletcher (New Zealand), Anthony White (Australia / France), Katarina Balunova (Slovakia), Evrim Özeskici (Turkey), Bernier Carol (Canada), Teona Chanishvili (Georgia), Erling Stuart Rohde (Norway), Ramūnas Čeponis (Lithuania), Madara Neikena (Latvia).

Anthony White's work considers collision points, shifts and ruptures at the site of geopolitical and cultural boundaries, particularly in relation to global immigration crises; echoing Edward Said's identification of 'the inextricable links' between Modernism, war and immigration. White's works are often characterized by an awareness of surface and a preoccupation with physicality and the found object.
A dominant area of research in his work has been concerned with the phenomenon of Empires: How do empires construct narratives to promote and propagate ideology?

Edda Jachens - Graham Fletcher - Anthony White - Katarina Balunova - Evrim Özeskici - Bernier Carol - Teona Chanishvili - Erling Stuart Rohde - Ramūnas Čeponis - Madara Neikena -

Nanda Hobbs Contemporary is proud to present their inaugural solo exhibition of Paris-based Australian artist Anthony White.
In his new body of work, 'Crossing the Rubicon', White continues to excavate ideas sourced from defining moments in history and their intersection with current global socio-political issues, to inform his contemporary image making practice.
The title 'Crossing the Rubicon draws from an important moment in the history of Western civilization, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river in Italy in 49AD and changed the genesis of modern Europe.

'The protean nature of identity is examined in White’s, Constantinople I, an ebullient network of thick chalk-white lines over a background of rich purples, blues and golds. Fundamental to the histories of both Christianity and Islam, the city of Constantinople (current day Istanbul) embodies the idea of multiplicity; the shifting, multifarious nature of identity that underlies White’s interest in geographical and cultural boundaries. Located in Eurasia at the physical limit of Europe, where West meets East, Constantinople represents the meeting place of two continents, two dominant ideologies and centuries of change. Constantinople I give us a sense of this constant state of flux, of building and rebuilding.' (Robert Maconachie)

The exhibition 'Crossing the Rubicon' at Nanda Hobbs Contemporary is accompanied by a catalog, with text by Robert Maconachie.

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Metro Gallery, Melbourne, presents the second solo show of Paris based artist Anthony White. This new body of work draws upon the intersection of technology and the world of science fiction literature.
The title of the exhibition is derived from a variation of the title of the dystopian science fiction novel by H.G Wells 'The Sleeper Awakes', written in 1910.
Drawing parallels with themes of revolt and social unrest from the Wellsian novel and by juxtaposing these with today’s sense of interconnectedness and social mobility. The artist creates inspiration for the new exhibition, drawing upon themes in relation to the role of technology in current political events especially during the Arab Spring uprising of 2010.
Apart from the ongoing interest with literature the new body of work also makes reference to the gestural mark in the graffiti movement as an original form of dissent and an early form of collective violence. Through preliminary paper collages created from salvaged Paris subway advertisements.
These 13 new paintings show a preoccupation with the intersection of the gestural mark, bodily performance and corporeality drawing from the avant garde Japanese painting movement, Gutai of the 1950s. These new paintings further explore ideas of spontaneity, performance and the overlap between performative actions and gestural painting in order to gain transformative power or transcendence.

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This series is titled after the Italian term Pentimento. This phrase, which is used to describe layerings, additions or changes to a work of art, allows multitudinous readings, different layers as one descends through White’s palimpsest of forms and colours. However pentimento can also be translated as repentance, which suggests atonement or remorse. In 2009, White immigrated to France after being awarded a studio at La Cite Internationale Des Arts. Is Pentimento, then, a form of atonement for having left his native country, a gift from afar to compensate for his departure from Australia?

Rather than Australian indigenous art, White is more accustomed to comparisons with the abstractionists of the New York School of the 1950s, Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauchenberg’s Combines. The artist himself suggests the French affichistes artist Jacques Villegle who created magical collages via torn metro and street posters, creating poetical compositions that embraced elements of the alphabet, photography and design. It is not difficult to see Villegle’s influence on White.

Although distinctly painterly, one can see the suggestions of torn edges, of strange depths as though other narratives reside beneath the immediate surface. Like the hidden Egyptian hieroglyphs obscured by palimpsests of ‘new’ information, White creates a world of textures, his own secret histories which allow hours of contemplation, translation and interpretation.

Words by Ashley Crawford, Melbourne 2015

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Australian artist Anthony White debuts in Paris

Le Pave D’Orsay presents the work of Australian painter Anthony White in his first Parisian solo show.
Drawing from diverse travels from the Leipzig winter of 2010 to the initial experience on artist studio residency in Paris from 2009, the Paris based non-profit 
Le Pave D’Orsay presents a survey of the artist’s practice from the years 2008 - 2014 including collages, paintings and two distinct strands of abstraction. This broad overview of twenty two pieces encompass work that the artist has completed whilst on residency programmes throught out the United States and Europe.

White has been exhibiting internationally in over 35 group shows since 2006 including The Cat Street Gallery – Hong Kong, Tim Olsen Gallery – Sydney and the COMODAA Gallery in London. 

White’s work has been well received by the art world and widely collected. As the recipient of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship during 2007 he participated in further study at the New York Studio School, NY. He has also received new work commissions for the costume designer Catherine Martin.

Anthony White is represented by The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong and Roberta Moore, London

An accompanying catalogue is available upon request.

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