Wendy White b. 1971

The paintings and sculptures of Wendy White employ language and aesthetics related to different areas in visual culture, ranging from professional sports and muscle car culture to Abstract Expressionism. Using iconic branding, gestural mark making, and materials such as denim, the artist highlights topics of masculinity while producing metaphors that address our current social and political moment.

Following a mid-career retrospective at Museum Goch in Germany, White was inspired by the relationship between her early gestural works and her recent shaped paintings. For this new series of paintings that feature her iconic graphic emblems, gestural marks, and recent shaped paintings, White combines abstract, atmospheric backgrounds of earlier paintings with new materials such as black Dibond framing devices and suspended sculptures. MoMA’s recent Alexander Calder exhibition, Modern from the Start, also served as the impetus for White’s newly developed works. Calling upon Calder’s prototypical works from the late-1930s, White’s practice teases the parameters of foreground and background by suspending Dibond sculptures in front of her atmospheric paintings. The cantilever positioning in the work intensifies the competing focal points between stark-black sculptural objects and the numinous paintings that support them.