Anthony White Exhibition | Crossing the Rubicon

Published by: Nanda\Hobbs Contemporary | 25-Aug-2016
Nanda Hobbs Contemporary is proud to present their inaugural solo exhibition of Paris-based Australian artist Anthony White, whose work is predominantly painterly abstract, physically large works that have a tangible quality of surface. In his new body of work, Crossing the Rubicon, White continues to excavate ideas sourced from defining moments in history and their intersection with current global socio-political issues, to inform his contemporary image making practice. The exhibition explores collision points of the effects of modernism, war and globalisation. Join Anthony White and the Nanda\Hobbs team for the opening of Crossing the Rubicon on Thursday 22 September, 6 - 8 pm. The exhibition is on show from 20 - 30 September, 2016.
Venue: Nanda\Hobbs Contemporary
Address: Level 1, 66 King Street
Date: Thursday 22 September, 2016
Time: 6 - 8 pm
Buy / Ticket: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anthony-white-exhibition-opening-tickets-27186868656
Web: http://nandahobbs.com/artist/anthony-white
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Anthony White's, "Crossing the Rubicon", takes Julius Caesar's illegal crossing of the River Rubicon in 49BC as its point of departure. As Suetonius recounts, according to Roman law, by leading his army across the border from Gaul into Italy, Caesar committed treason, precipitating both bloody civil war and the genesis of Modern Europe. The Rubicon elicits an obvious metaphor here: from the Latin, Rubeus, meaning red, the river is so named for its sanguine waters coloured by a muddy river bed - a blood border. Caesar knew he could not turn back; "To Cross the Rubicon" is to reach the point of no return.

Born in Sydney and now living in Paris, White's recent paintings consider collision points, blurs, diffusions, shifts and ruptures at the site of geopolitical and cultural boundaries, particularly in relation to global immigration crises. Echoing Edward Said's identification of "the inextricable links" between Modernism, war and immigration, the problems which these moments of rupture raise for contemporary image making are rigorously worked over in White's content-loaded gestural mark making.

White's image making has been formally and materially driven, borne from his initial studies of Euro-American abstraction. In Crossing the Rubicon paint is, in the Greenbergian sense, both medium and subject matter, but the self-reflexive mode is engaged via a conceptual framework which foregrounds the legal as opposed to the formal.

Robert Maconachie London July 2016

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