OPENING: 

Saturday, 6 Nov 2021, noon - 6 pm

In presence of the artist.

Galerie Thomas Zander is pleased to present a solo exhibition with new paintings by the British painter James White.

In James White‘s monochrome paintings everyday objects seem to suggest scenes and encounters, which are never fully revealed: a broken glass, a burning lamp, a bunch of keys put down on a marble top. The London based artist (born 1967 in Tiverton, England) paints the reflecting surfaces in high contrasts and meticulously like still lifes. But the choice and style of the objects connects them to the present. Aesthetically, White draws on the production of suspense and ambiguity in film noir and shows evidence of photographic influences of William Eggleston or Larry Sultan. 

The realistic depiction of the objects and rooms in his works diverts attention away from the materiality of the images. Their black and white tonal range, however, and the openly displayed support and edges of the works, which are encased in acrylic boxes, investigate the conventions of visual media and their perception. The paintings on wood, aluminium and acrylic are based on photographs of the artist‘s immediate en­virons. In addition to selected large-scale paintings, the exhibition’s main focus is on a series of works created over the course of this year. The new series was not painted in the artist’s studio, but in his home. Both their narrative frame of reference and the more intimate scale of the works can be seen in relation to these circumstances. Thus the new paintings once again explore the intersections of close­ness and distance, surface and depth, presence and absence. 

James White studied at Wimbledon College of Arts and the Royal College of Art in London. His work has recently been part of the exhibition Deceptive Images: Playing With Painting and Photography at Marta Herford Museum in Herford, Germany and will soon be on view in the group exhibition Fragile – Alles aus Glas: Grenzbereiche des Skulpturalen at Kunsthalle Vogelmann Heilbronn, Germany.