Kit White: Walls & Occupied Spaces
FreedmanArt is very pleased to present Walls and Occupied Spaces, new paintings by Kit White, opening April 16, 2019. The spaces in these paintings exist as metaphorical landscapes occupied by linear structures derived from both the organic and inorganic. Kit White’s new work incorporates photographic images into his paintings as poignant backdrops to abstract lines. The photograph provides a material, worldly context for the drawing, which, though abstract, represents the real as an analog mark. This new series of works seek out images of land that have been scarred by conflict. Initially, the images were of contested spaces of what we have traditionally referred to as the Middle East, places where competing claims to land have led to war-like confrontations. Conflicts of all kinds, violent and non-violent, surround us and announce themselves through walls, barriers, and borders. These collisions, not always physical, are manifestations of the fraught politics of occupation, both actual and symbolic. The artist also found himself drawn to the photographs of Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) and others of the Civil War, and meditating on the figurative wall born of that conflict, a psychological division that continues to separate us. Kit White studied at Harvard University, A.B. Fine Arts, Cum Laude, and had his first solo exhibition with Betty Parsons at Parsons/Dreyfuss Gallery in 1977. His work has been the subject of more than twenty- five solo exhibitions in galleries and Museums. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award for painting and was a professor of painting for twenty-one years at Pratt Institute. His work is the subject of a monograph by Carter Ratcliff, Line Into Form, and Kit is the author of the international best-selling book 101 Things To Learn In Art School, published by MIT Press. A large selection of the original drawings from this book are in the collection of the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at the Corcoran School of Art and Design, George Washington University. FreedmanArt established in 2011, serves to educate the public with an active exhibition program, guided by invitational artist exhibitions and special project conceptions both historical and new.