Wendy White b. 1971

Wendy White is best known for large-scale works that challenge pictorial space by way of sculptural additions and interventions. Using iconic branding, gestural mark-making, and materials such as denim, White continuously revisits her ongoing series, taking visual cues from contemporary advertising and twentieth-century art history to address our current social and political landscape. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, the machine and the hand, and the intentional and haphazard, White reasserts and recontextualizes existing signs and symbols until she takes complete control of their meaning. 

Confronting the boxed-in limitations of the traditional canvas, White flattens the hierarchy of imagery in her works through the amalgamation of photographs and logos that are quintessential to American popular cultures, such as iconic sports and automotive brands. The artist’s insistence in creating something “new” is similar to modifying a car or altering a readymade, with seemingly endless formal variations, design adjustments, and performance upgrades. Through this recontextualizing of her signature artistic gestures, she furthers a core objective of her work: to push against the restrictions proposed by conventional painting to present a hybrid experience.

Wendy White (b. 1971, Deep River, CT; Lives and works in New York, NY) received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. Institutional exhibitions include Low Pressure at Museum Goch, Germany; The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art at Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2018) and LACMA, Los Angeles (2014); Full of Peril and Weirdness: Painting as a Universalism, M Woods, Beijing (2015); Globe as a Palette: Contemporary Art from the Taguchi Collection, Hokkaido Obihiro Museum of Art (2019); The Art Show: Art of the New Millenium in Taguchi Art Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan (2016); Taguchi Hiroshi Art Collection at The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan (2015); American Idyll at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2018); EXPEDITION at The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (2021); and So Athletic, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin (2012).

White is the recipient of the Teiger Mentorship in the Arts at Cornell University (2019), a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2012), and a George Segal Painting Grant (2008). Her work was featured in Phaidon’s anthology Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting (2011) and has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Artnet, Time Out New York, Modern Painters, ArtNews and BOMB Magazine, among others.

White’s work is on permanent public display at the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, St. Louis and the Le Verger Sculpture Garden in Lacoste, France. In spring 2023, White will present Harmonic Balance, a permanent sculpture commission for the Chelsea Piers Fitness Center Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, NY. The artist’s works are in the permanent collection of Detroit Institute of the Arts; The High Museum; RISD Art Museum; Museum Goch; The Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham; Kranzberg Art Foundation; Saks Fifth Avenue; Taguchi Art Collection; UK Art Museum; Mercedes-Benz Stadium; Savannah College of Art & Design; UBS Art Collection; Progressive Art Collection; Jimenéz-Colón Collection; The Shinola Hotel; Tulip Collection; Rocket Mortgage Field House; Detroit Pistons Practice Facility; Southern Poverty Law Center and ARCO Foundation.