David Ben White’s first exhibition at l’étrangère, will treat the spaces of the gallery as subjects to be reinterpreted; the homogenous model of the white cube is reformed via signifiers of a familiar, domestic interior. On entering the gallery a constructed environment comprising painting, sculpture and vinyl installation draws the viewer into a re-configuration of the relationship between gallery, artwork and spectator, one that gestures towards an interior design logic.
David Ben White, Inside Outside 16, 2015. Mixed media, 123 x 123 cm © David Ben White. Courtesy the artist and l’étrangère
A new group of paintings which lend the exhibition its title present a series of imagined interior spaces with plate glass windows as their main point of focus. The tension between transparency and obscuration that is embedded within the material of glass connects to White’s distorting of the rectilinear, modernist grid within these works. As Le Corbusier wrote in 1925: ‘The horizontal gaze leads far away…we will get the feeling of being look outs dominating a world in order’. Through layering, erratic contours and warped perspective, White destabilises the fixed, hierarchical perspective and ordered geometry promulgated by modernism, which according to the artist, is as much about individual power as it is about a set of prescribed aesthetics.
For White, the viewer lies at the centre of the pull between private spaces and those of art. The partial framing of his canvases combined with the vinyl installation throughout the gallery suggests an extension of his painted image beyond its restrictive frame. Moreover, the traces of design embedded within familiar domestic furnishings are adopted by White in the production of his sculptures; they occupy the physical space of the gallery as a set of awkward interventions.
David Ben White, The Personification of an Ideal (Margarete), 2014, Mixed media, 51 x 41 cm © David Ben White. Courtesy the artist and l’étrangère
In the back gallery we encounter a series of portraits featuring overlooked or forgotten women from modernist history placed next to a large, dystopic depiction of a modernist edifice. Titled Personification of an Ideal, the portraits hold an unsettling duality: the directness of their gaze is undermined by the grid that covers and structures their facial composition. Distorted by an imposed power, these works not only reveal an unsettling reality beneath the utopian rhetoric of modernism, but they reveal the rendition of control that it enacts.
David Ben White dedicates this exhibition to Paul Eachus
David Ben White Inside Outside Private view: Thursday 29 October 30th October – 5th December 44a Charlotte Road London EC2A 3PD www.letrangere.net
About The Artist
David Ben White (b. 1965) is a British artist based in London. He works in painting, sculpture and installation, graduating from Chelsea College of Art (2011) and Central St. Martins College of Art, London (2006).
Solo exhibitions include ‘Living Room’, Kerstin Engholm Gallery, Vienna (2013); The Clifford Chance/University of the Arts London Sculpture Award, Clifford Chance, London (2012); TABLEtop, The Mews Project Space, London (2012); Painting Pavilion, (And/Or), London (2010). Group exhibitions include ‘Chelsea 10’, Chelsea College of Arts (2015); ‘Architecture of Enjoyment: 6 artists, 6 designers’, Horatio Jr., London (2015); ‘East London Painting Prize 2015’, London (2015); ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it’, with Fay Nicholson, Gerald Moore Gallery (2014).
White has received a number of prizes, including The Clifford Chance/University of the Arts London Sculpture Award (2012), Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2011), Coleman Project Space Annual Residency Award, East London Painting Prize (shortlist) (2015). His work is held in a number of collections including The Central St. Martins Contemporary Collection, The University of the Arts Collection, Ernst & Young, and Eversheds.
