6 Years | 6 Works

Oct 11 - Dec 2, 2011
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Wendy White fuses painting, sculpture, and architectural reference into large scale, multi-paneled, and sensitively composed explosions of color and mark. This exhibition features large works dating between 2006 and 2011 tracking White’s development and emergence as a prominent figure contributing to the revitalized course of painting and abstraction in the 21st Century.

“Wendy White’s work is at once rigorous and demanding, yet playful and even ebullient.” notes Ron Buffington, UC Foundation Professor of Art at UTC. “This exhibition in the Cress will provide a glimpse into the trajectory of one of the field’s most promising practitioners.”

White’s progression from “single canvas”, an approach all painters would recognize, to “contained canvas” challenging painted space within framed space, led her to shaped canvas and canvas shaped like no one has yet accomplished. Letter forms, typography or graffiti, and forms that stand alone are often surrounded by negative space which is simply the wall upon which the work is mounted. Surveying her own urban surroundings that frankly translate to urban life anywhere, White’s work sizzles and pops and makes us all look up at attention as if watching a finely crafted trailer for a movie soon to be released. Yet this is no movie, it’s a work of art from the hands of an artist who is “in” it. A place of space and a history to reference has replaced the role of the subconscious in the field of painterly abstraction. Reality in all of its beauty and blatancy, as the truth of reality is both, is recognized and present, and monumentally respected in a transformation of vibrant form and brilliant color.