Anthony White (b.1976 Sydney, Australia)

Lives and works in Paris, France and has exhibited widely over the past decade with solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Paris and Hong Kong. White has also been regularly curated into group exhibitions focusing on Contemporary Australian Painting internationally.

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White has been awarded a number of private and public commissions and residencies, including a residency at the Spinnerei in Leipzig, Germany (2010) and The Paris Studio at La Cite Internationale Des Arts, Paris (2009). During 2007 he was the recipient of The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to the United States of America. These international projects have been influential to the development of this body of work, which was surveyed in an exhibition at Le Pave D’Orsay, Paris (2014).

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Anthony White’s paintings are informed by his critical engagement with historical narratives and current social issues and their relationship to the production of contemporary image making. Materiality figures heavily in White's practice and his works are often characterised by an acute awareness of surface, a preoccupation with physicality and the found object. White revisits recurrent thematic subject matter through his work, considering colonialist legacies and links between imperialist narratives and the propagation of cultural objects.

White’s recent paintings consider collision points, blurs, diffusions, 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, the problems which these moments of rupture raise for contemporary image making are rigorously worked over in White’s content-loaded gestural mark making.

White has utilised non-traditional techniques such as throwing rags doused in paint to create patterning, blurring and diffusions, principally to build up transparent layers of paint. In doing so, the artist reflects on both conceptual and aesthetic ideas relating to identity and diaspora caused by war and the implications of Modernism. Combining references from historical postwar Japan and Ancient Rome the artist analyses periods of social unrest as a vehicle of breakthrough movements in civil and aesthetic history.

The paintings draw aesthetically and emotively from the Gutai movement of 1950s, namely the Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga. During this period Japan was in a state of rebuilding its national identity after WWII. By questioning the rise of the new cultural paradigm of the West, the Gutai artists created something uniquely Japanese.

The protean nature of identity is also 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.

- Maconachie, Robert Challenging Mud Catalogue Essay from Crossing The Rubicon Exhibition Catalogue at Nanda Hobbs Contemporary Sydney August 2016