Anthony White As the Sleeper Wakes at Metro Gallery

MEDIA RELEASE

5th - 28th MAY 2016

Anthony White 'As The Sleeper Wakes'

Metro Gallery presents the second solo show of Paris based artist Anthony White. White's thirteen new paintings explore themes of gender, violence and identity within modernist Japanese, European and Australian cultures.

The paintings draw upon the intersection of technology and the world of science fiction literature - the name of the exhibition is a variation of the title of H.G Wells dystopian science fiction novel The Sleeper Awakes. Written in 1910, the story centers around a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years. He wakes up in a completely transformed London where he has become the richest man in the world as a result of the growing interest on his bank accounts. However, to his horror the future is now governed by an organization ruling in his name.

White draws parallels with themes of revolt and social unrest from the Wellian novel and juxtaposes them with today's sense of interconnectedness and social mobility. It is here the artist creates inspiration for the new exhibition. White visits themes such as the role of technology in political events, particularly focusing on the Arab Spring uprising of 2010. With this in addition to an ongoing interest in literature, Whites new body of work makes reference to the gestural mark of the graffiti movement as an original form of dissent and an early form of collective violence. Demonstrated preliminary through paper collages salvaged from Paris Subways, the medium has previously existed as mass media advertisements, and was often vandalized and torn, tagged with gestural lines and people's marks. These affiches then become a personal form of communication. In taking this medium from a public space, where its original role is a form of dissent, it thus sees personal voices reflecting a broader public and social outcry. The new works show a preoccupation with the intersection of the gestural mark, bodily performance and corporeality, overlapping between action and gestural painting in order to gain transformative power or transcendence. With this, ideas emerge about modern societies ongoing metamorphosis in the place of violence and its ongoing role within it.

For Anthony White (1976 Born Sydney Australia Lives and works in Paris) living in France amongst different cultures has naturally lead to working across various artistic disciplines. By merging contemporary forms of urban landscape and his Australian heritage across disciplines of drawing, painting, and collage the artist creates works often characterised by an awareness of surface and a preoccupation with the engagement of physicality and the found object. The artist was awarded the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship 2007 where he travelled to New York and worked at the New York Studio School and the Paris Studio Award 2009 where he was artist in residence in Paris for three months at La Cite Internationale Des Arts.(2009) Anthony White has exhibited widely over the past decade, recent exhibitions include Art Central Hong Kong with Metro gallery 2016 and final round finalist in the Summer Exhibition at The Royal Academy London, 2015. Recent gallery solo exhibitions have included Pentimento at Metro gallery (2015) a survey exhibition at Le Pave D'Orsay (2014), Informal Relations at The Cat St Gallery, Hong Kong (2013) and two solo shows with Sydney gallerist Iain Dawson: Paris Paintings (2010), and Scratching The Surface (2011). He has also been regularly curated into group exhibitions focussing on Australian Contemporary Painting in Sydney, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Brisbane The artist has been has been the recipient of the Marten Bequest for Painting 2007, the FONAS Paris Studio at La Cite Internationale Des Arts 2009, a scholarship to the LIA Programme in Leipzig Germany.

The current exhibition marks the artist's second solo exhibition at Metro Gallery. For further press information, images and interview requests contact. Rebecca Sheehan rebecca@metrogallery.com.au / +61395008511