The Performance paintings
An essential part of modern popular culture’s armoury, the light show serves to enhance the performers’ power, lifting or coercing their audience to heightened, mesmeric states. Digital light, LED advertising light, light as an architectural feature all play into our collective experience of modernity. The Performance paintings can be seen to reach back to the Impressionists, with their shared ambition of translating the play of light into representations of modernity.
Inside Outside at l'étrangère gallery
Taking place at L’étrangère gallery in London, Inside Outside connected the partial framing of the paintings with the graphic colour system that was added to the gallery walls, making the white cube gallery wall an extension of the paintings’ logic. In the second gallery space was a series entitled Personification of an ideal: portraits of female modernists who were denied access to the gallery and institutional support that their male counterparts enjoyed.
Monument paintings
The Monument paintings contrive to make formal connections to memento mori paintings, with their dark, foreboding backdrops, the paintings situate the familiar iconic modernist chair within a Romantic, painterly environment. To further hybridise the aesthetic, floating three dimensional geometric shapes have been added to the surfaces to flatten the impression.
Aha! at pierre d’avoine architects
Formed of two installations set within the architectural offices of Pierre d’Avoine architects and within the shadow of Denys Lasdun’s iconic Keeling House, Aha! Featured a wooden framing device that acted as sculptural structure, as public information service and as a continuation of the grid format within the paintings, into which the viewer could look into and through. The skeletons’ presence throughout Aha! plays with the significance of the X-ray as a component in the visual and intellectual mechanism of the modernist movement and, in particular, draws influence from Beatriz Colamina’s book ‘X-Ray Arcitecture” from 2019.
Undivided Attention paintings
The Undivided Attention paintings appear as colour-filled, geometric rooms doubling as geometric abstract patterns. Focusing primarily on television screens that sit in the spaces, the screens’ abstracted painterly languages are continually offset by abstract paintings/abstracted patterning that operate around them.
Outside Inside at kerstin engholm gallery
In her text Grids, Rosalind Krauss suggests: “Unlike perspective, the grid does not map the space of a room or a landscape or a group of figures on the surface of a painting. Indeed, if it maps anything, it maps the surface of the painting itself.” Willfully setting out to challenge that insular logic, Outside Inside continued the idea of extending the painting into the logic of the gallery. An added ingredient was to challenge the modernist architectural cliché of the idealised female sculptural presence within modernist domestic spaces. In the second gallery space I continued the series ‘Personification of an ideal’, portraits of female modernists who were denied access to the gallery and institutional support that their male counterparts enjoyed.
Inside Outside/
Outside Inside paintings
In her text Grids, Rosalind Krauss suggests: “Unlike perspective, the grid does not map the space of a room or a landscape or a group of figures on the surface of a painting. Indeed, if it maps anything, it maps the surface of the painting itself.” Willfully setting out to challenge that insular logic, the subject matter for the work was a series of domestic modernist interiors. The paintings’ partial framing systems matched the geometric colour systems applied to the gallery walls, extending into the gallery design itself. In that sense, it was important that the paintings appear not only as works of art, but also as design objects.
sculptures in shows
The domestic location is a strangely powerful location. Like a theatre set, or work of fiction, the home is a place in which we, as consumers, define our own aspirations and taste. In this dialogue, the domestic space becomes a familiar, but also alienating location. Throughout my practise, I have oscillated between the two-dimensional paintings and the three-dimensional worlds in which they inhabit. From Temples to the Domestic onwards to the most recent, The Family Bauhaus, this relationship with the alienation of the domestic setting has been a central theme.
david ben white
David Ben White (b.1965, London) studied at Central St Martins (2003 – 2006) and Chelsea College of Art (2009-2011.) In 2011, White was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 and exhibited at S1 Artspace ( Sheffield) and the ICA London. In 2012, White was the winner of the Clifford Chance/University of the Arts Sculpture Award for which he created the exhibition ‘Temples to the Domestic’ at the London offices of Clifford Chance. White has exhibited his work extensively in the UK as well as internationally. Recent solo shows include ‘Inside Outside’ (2015) with L’étrangère Gallery and ‘Outside Inside’ (2016) and ’Living Room’(2014) at Kerstin Engholm Gallery in Vienna. Previously he exhibited a number of solo shows with Studio 1.1, with whom he will be exhibiting ‘The Performance’ paintings in March 2020.
