Anthony White
December 30, 2019
Anthony White makes supersaturated maximalist 'paintings' of the cheap consumer trash, luxury branded ephemera, and digitally mediated bodies that populate our ultra-capitalist post-internet reality. The pieces are made from PLA (polylactic acid— a type of renewable bioplastic) using a novelty craft gun that bears resemblance to a tattoo machine. "I think my works are more drawings than they are paintings," he says. "You can see the marks. With a painting you can blur those lines. Here you can't." White's work— painting, drawing, or otherwise— uniquely channels our current zeitgeist into immaculately detailed mashups of high and low culture. "It's not as meditative as it is stressful," he says, "but I enjoy it."
WRIGHT RELATIONSHIPS, PLA on panel, 2019
In WRIGHT RELATIONSHIPS (2019) we see stacks of cash, Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, an overturned Dairy Queen blizzard, Gucci's now infamous blackface sweater, and much much more, all set in front of an exquisite cerulean floral pattern. White himself says that our desire for expensive luxury goods is "the same as that three year old that really wanted that chewing gum." Gallerist Greg Kucera compares him to the tradition of vanitas paintings, in which still lives are filled with objects reminiscent of earthly pleasures and the inevitability of death. Anthony simultaneously indulges desire while keeping an ironic distance, as if to say "none of this matters."
ROUGH HOUSE, PLA on panel, 2019
THICC WATER, PLA on panel, 2018
2018's THICC WATER, a large tondo panel, features 2 nude women floating in a pool littered with candy colored consumer junk. There are Pacific Northwest staples like Dick's burgers and Sizzle Pie, stacks of money, a champagne bottle spilling over, a wasted gallon of cheap vodka, and more. Peeking through a sprinkled donut is Kendall Jenner on the cover of an issue of Forbes magazine dedicated to women billionaires. The piece is a testament to the way in which everything, including equality, is subsumed, assimilated by capital.
INCOGNITO, PLA on panel, 2019
ANCHORED, PLA on panel, 2019
In ANCHORED (2019), as well as INCOGNITO, and TO A FLAME, the digital interface has become more prominent, echoing the extreme mediation of contemporary visual experience. Here he depicts a severely foreshortened, pierced and tattooed male torso reminiscent of Jesus on the cross. The tattoos operate as both a nod to Anthony's past tattooing friends and family and a true-to-life depiction of a young American today (nearly half of all American adults now have at least one tattoo). Finally, Anthony's central placement of a reload button, knowing that many more eyeballs will see ANCHORED online than IRL, functions as a sort of digital Trompe-l'oeil, goading online viewers into incessantly tapping the "button," frustrated at it not delivering the expected dopamine hit.
LIME-LITE, PLA on panel, 2019
Anthony has been on a meteoric rise since graduating from Cornish College of the Arts in 2018, and already has a huge year lined up for 2020. You still have until February 1st to catch his solo show at Public Gallery, London. Anthony will be an artist in residence at Amazon, Seattle this February. He will be included in a group show at Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery, Lewis and Clark College, in Portland, opening in January. And opening June 2020 is a show he is curating at Museum of Museums, titled ‘In Crystalized Time.’ But mostly, he says, he’s getting ready for another solo show at Greg Kucera, opening October 2020.
TO A FLAME, PLA on panel, 2019
