ANTHONY WHITE - Artist - What is the Role of Artists in Society?

What role do the visual arts play in drawing upon history, activating democracy, and asking questions about what culture can do?

Australian artist Anthony White lives and works in Paris. White’s artistic work revolves around the notion of reclaiming the act of dissent through the production of cultural objects. His research is situated at the intersection of several fields in the social space including, politics, human rights, and postcolonialism. His practice is centered around concepts of design and its history as a form of social and political expression. He works with painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. Through this practice, he tackles relevant questions to our time, to encourage emancipation and new ways of thinking.

Anthony White’s artwork has been exhibited in Australia, Europe, and Asia. He has received support through cultural agencies such as The Trust Company Australia, The National Association for the Visual Arts,(NAVA) and The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). He has also received critical acclaim by recognition in the form of art prizes and reviews most notably The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2007) The Creative Art Fellowship at The National Library of Australia (2020) and acknowledgements in The Australia Financial Review, Art Collector Magazine Australia and also Elle Décor US edition. His exhibition Manifestation is on show from the 12–30 of July at Lennox Street Gallery, in Melbourne.

"Most of the landscape work that I'm making is heavily impastoed oil paintings, which are made with brushes and palette knives, and I was motivated to make a body of works about the climate catastrophe because of the short amount of time since I left Australia 14 years ago, the climate crisis has really hit areas of Australia in a such a dramatic way. That was a method of making the painting landscape orientated around different areas in Tasmania. I also felt that urgency to make the painting at that time. Growing up in Australia, the colonial legacy of landscape painters. And sailors, they had the tradition of actually drawing and painting, that was their basic skills. So they could draw and paint obviously in a pretty prescriptive way, but Australia's still quite fascinated with the landscape. When you grow up there, it's definitely something that stays within you. But I think that the story of the landscape, especially because it's not ours as an Australian, right? It will be interesting to see how that develops in the future and what happens with the story of Australian landscape and this story of Aboriginal landscape to come. It is an exciting place because Aboriginal person's perspective of landscape is much different because there are so many stories."

www.anthonywhite.art
www.instagram.com/anthony_white_paris/
www.metrogallery.com.au/exhibitions/manifestation

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