Anthony White
White at the Nancy Fairfax Studio Residency at The Tweed Heads Regional Gallery during August 2018.
Born	1976
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	The National Art School Sydney
Known for	Painting, Contemporary Art
Website	www.anthonywhite.art

Anthony White (born 1976 in Sydney, Australia) is an Australian visual artist. A National Art School, Sydney, graduate, White has worked and lived in Paris since 2009. White has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne,^[1] Sydney, Paris, Latvia, London ^[2] and Hong Kong.^[3]

Art Practice and themes

Landscape and architectural references are used in White's work across the disciplines of drawing, painting, collage and sculpture.^[4]

Writer Robert Maconachie wrote that, “White's artistic work revolves around the notion of reclaiming the act of dissent through the production of cultural objects. His research is situated at the intersection of several fields in the social space including, politics, human rights, and postcolonialism. His practice is centered around concepts of design and its history as a form of social and political expression. He works with painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. Through this practice, he tackles relevant questions to our time, to encourage emancipation and new ways of thinking.”^[5]

Career

Anthony White, Image from Video Trailer from Signs of Civilisation, 2018

Anthony White grew up in Sydney, New South Wales, and obtained his bachelor's degree in Fine Arts (B.F.A) at the National Art School, Sydney in 2005. He received instruction under contemporary Australian-Romanian artist Aida Tomescu.^[6] He also obtained a Diploma of Creative Studies at the School of Creative Arts, Sydney in 2002, and trained at the Marathon Program at The New York Studio School, New York in 2007, before relocating to Paris, France in 2009.

Over the past two decades of his career, White has exhibited globally, and achieved critical acclaim through international residency programmes and major art prizes. White's work is held in major public and private collections internationally, and he has received acknowledgements in The Australia Financial Review,^[7] Art Collector Magazine Australia and Elle Décor.^[8]

Exhibitions and residencies

White has been awarded a number of international commissions and residencies, which have reportedly been influential in developing his body of work, surveyed in White's solo exhibition at Le Pave D'Orsay, Paris (2014).^[9][10]

Anthony White, Michael Woolworth editions, 2015

White received funding from the Australian Copyright Agency Ltd Career Fund in August 2015 to attend a lithographic printmaking workshop with Michael Woolworth in Paris.^[11] This resulted in the production of a seven-colour lithograph.^[12]

White's 2018 work, shown in the exhibition Signs of Civilization, reflected a move to socially engaged practice. Art writer Jane O'Neill says, "White takes some cues from earlier activist artists such as Yves Klein or the post-war Japanese Gutai movement. Yet the driving force behind these works is Franz Kafka's 1919 novel In the Penal Colony, a story that pre-empts the current refugee crises throughout the Pacific. White describes how the exhibition "continues my sustained enquiry into the relationship between Modernism and colonialist concepts of empire." In doing so, he asserts the role of the artist as inherently political and urges us to consider the role of artistic interventions in the current climate."^[13]

Anthony White, Le Pave D'Orsay, Paris, 2014

White presented his major solo exhibition Mobilising Material with The Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia in 2022.^[14] The exhibition centred around personal emancipation by raising questions about surveillance, detainment and injustice in Western capitalist civilisation.^[15]

In 2020, White was awarded the Creative Arts Fellowship to conduct research into the National Library of Australia's collection relating to Sidney Nolan. The fellowship was delayed until 2022 due to international travel restrictions.^[16] In the interim, White collaborated with Informality and the Sidney Nolan Trust to present a virtual exhibition at the Rodd, Nolan's former home in Wales.^[16] White resumed the Creative Arts Fellowship in 2022 and investigated Nolan's Eureka Stockade mural that informed a new body of abstract paintings presented in his 2023 exhibition Manifestation with Lennox St Gallery.^[17]

White also presented work in the 2021 Luxembourg Art Fair,^[18] and exhibited in Spring1883^[19] and The Spirit of Place at Macquarie University,^[20] both in 2023.

Collections and acquisitions

White was selected to participate in the 2017 International Painting Symposium at the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, Latvia, in September 2017. Two works were acquired by the museum for the permanent collection.^[21] Of these, White said "The works made during the symposium are a direct reaction to my lived experience in Europe, and at a more nuanced level in dialogue with the place, the reflections on Rothko himself and his use of colour as a vehicle to consider deeper aspects of humanity. Of particular interest to me is the sense one gets from his works about the inherent relationship between his use of colour and notions of human rights. What drew me to the Centre was to research how Rothko gave equal importance to both painting as a physical endeavour, as well as a philosophical enquiry."^[22]

As well as his work being held in numerous private collections, White's portrait Mandrake - Portrait of Baz Luhrmann (charcoal on paper) was acquired in 2014 for the Australian Portrait Collection of the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Centre.^[23] This work was also a Finalist in the Kedumba Drawing Award 2014 ^[24]

In 2018, Elle Decor Magazine mentioned an abstract painting by Anthony White hanging in the home of Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin.^[8]

Key works

Recognitions and awards

White's work Federation Peak^[29] was one of 42 finalists in the 2021 Glover Prize which received 640 entrants representing the, “best artworks of the Tasmanian landscape.” White's work in landscape centres on the climate catastrophe and Australia's colonial legacy of landscape painters.^[25] The Glover Prize catalogue included White's reflections:

“Tasmania is under threat from ecological disaster. During 2019 at the base of Federation Peak fires were at the edge of the surrounding alpine forests. In a devastatingly short amount of time ecological threat has gone from fantasy to a reality. The fires of 2019 signifies a new age of climate catastrophe, one in which we need urgent action to slow down the immediate effects of an increase in sea temperatures, heatwaves and extreme rainfall events. The southwest of the island the vastly uninhabited area, a world heritage site, is beginning to die as documented in various media reports most notably from the Guardian article dated February 2019 water scientist -Professor Peter Davies quoted as saying -“the island's vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the heart of it’s world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of rainforest, button grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish because of climate change.”^[30]

Anthony White, biography photo, Marten Bequest (2008)

Selected publications

• "Anthony White: Mobilising Material," Anthony White with an introduction by Rob Maconachie, 2022.
• "5x5 Exhibition London". Catalog Essay by Ashley Crawford. 27 May 2010.
• "Inverting The Panopticon". Catalog Essay by Robert Maconachie. London, 2019.
• "Henley Life Magazine". Robert Maconachie. 4 October 2019.
• "On Challenging Mud: Anthony White's, Crossing The Rubicon". Catalog Essay by Robert Maconachie. Sydney, 1 September 2016.
• "Apocalypse Now". In As The Sleeper Wakes, Exhibition Catalog by Ashley Crawford. 1 May 2016.
• "Strictly Townhouse". Vanessa Lawrence. Elle Decor Magazine US Edition, September 2018, p. 136-142.

References