Design and Art Australia Online

Biography

Anthony White is a Paris-based Australian artist working across painting, collage and printmaking. He immigrated to France from Australia during 2009.

White’s practice explores the intersection of historical and current social issues and how they relate to the production of contemporary image making. His works are often characterised by an acute awareness of surface and a preoccupation with the engagement of physicality and the found object.

The 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris was a catalysing moment for the artist to look at civilisation more broadly and how civilisation is linked to culture. His practice considers collision points, shifts and ruptures at the site of geopolitical and cultural boundaries, particularly in relation to global immigration crisis. He has expressed in an interviews in Australia during 2018 an interest “in reclaiming the radicality of the gestural mark as a form of dissent, to question the functioning of the Western ideals of sovereign power,democracy and the fallout of current foreign policy.”

White's recent work, shown in the exhibition Signs of Civilization, (2018) reflects 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."


Anthony White born Australia 1976 Lives and works in Paris France. He has exhibited widely over the past decade with solo exhibitions in Australia, France,Germany and Latvia and Asia. White has also been regularly curated into exhibitions focusing on Contemporary Painting in Sydney, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Brisbane.