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7/3/2007

James White

Max Wigram Gallery, London

Doomed

Max Wigram Gallery is proud to present the second solo exhibition at the gallery by British artist James White. White is best known for his high-contrast black and white paintings the tone and subject matter of which quietly exist, as silent moments of everyday life. White brings together the still-life genre of 17th Dutch painting with the rigorous methodology of 1970s’ Conceptual artist On Kawara’s systematic approach to documenting time. The source materials for the subject matter are snapshots from his life, photos impulsively taken: their slow, detailed transformation into paintings and then into sculptural objects, places great emphasis on the process and physicality of the work.

The ongoing series Dark Thoughts consists of portraits of friends painted with their eyes closed to convey their withdrawal into an intimate space, that of the mind. This device creates a barrier and removes a convention associated with traditional portraiture – that of the eye contact. White asked his friends to think of the first and worst thing they could imagine, a thought which becomes the subject of the paintings. To create a further barrier, he then obscures the paintings with dark tinted Perspex.

As the exhibition title suggests, the mood of this new body of work is altogether darker than in White’s previous works, alluding to the reconciliation of viewpoints relating to negative events that surround us and circulate in the media. The paintings introduce reoccurring motifs. For instance, in the sarcastically-titled work The Milk Of Human Kindness (2006), the artist has turned the white liquid of an half-empty glass into something as black as poison. The glass is clearly used in a symbolic way, inverting the image to produce a “negative” of itself. Concepts of depiction and negation, of access and denial are what make White’s practice so effective.

White (b. 1967, UK) lives and works in London. He was a Prize Winner in this year’s prestigious John Moores 24 Painting Prize. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in the UK and internationally since 1991. Exhibitions include The Saatchi Gallery (New Blood, 2004), The New Art Gallery, Walsall (Blue, 2000), Fig-1 (Atoll, 2000) and Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York (solos in 1997 and 2000).

Further Press Information
Please contact the gallery on +44 (0)20 74954960 or write to press@maxwigram.com.

Private view, Thursday 8 March, 6.30-8.30 PM

Max Wigram Gallery
99 New Bond Street - London

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