John M. White exhibit in Pasadena opens March 4

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JOHN M. WHITE
Recent Works

March 4 - April 15, 2012

Opening Reception
Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm


Offramp Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition, John M. White: Recent Works from March 4 - April 15, 2012. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Sunday, March 4 from 2-5pm. There will be an artist's talk and a closing reception on Sunday, April 15 from 2-5pm.



John M. White is considered a seminal figure in the development of performance art in California from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. Since that time, most of his attention has been refocused on his paintings, drawings and installations. He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art New Talent Award in 1971, a CETA grant and Djerassi Fellowship. White’s paintings and drawings are represented in permanent museum collections around the world, including the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the La Foret Museum in Tokyo.

A fixture on the Los Angeles art scene since the early 70's, and honored in 2011 by a retrospective exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts, John M. White's considerable contribution to contemporary art is further acknowledged by being included in four of this year's Pacific Standard Time exhibitions. Throughout his career, White has focused on three major areas of work: performance art, installations, and drawing and painting. John M. White: Recent Works at Offramp Gallery includes paintings from his Artifishial Hatches series and drawings from the Mind Field series.

Artifishial Hatch is a series of his recent paintings. The movement of insect hatches on free-flowing streams inspired the abstracted water landscapes. Filled with the visual frenzy of activities and humor for which Whites’ work is known, the Artifishial Hatch series is painted in acrylics on paper handmade in Tibet.

White states: “This series began simply enough on a rainy day in a fishing cabin. I had brought along some paper to draw on, but forgot my colored inks. While my fishing partner, Mike Rupp, was cleaning trout for dinner, I took the fish guts and rubbed them all over the paper and added some coffee. After the paper dried, I drew in some artificial flies that he was tying. Since then, I have completed several medium to large sized paintings on handmade paper."

"The Mind Field series began as a drawing attempt at capturing the “dark” scene surrounding a boxer’s death in the ring where I was a spectator. I thought of drawing as a memorial work. It has led me to complete over 100 stream of consciousness drawings about everyday life."


Offramp Gallery • 1702 Lincoln Avenue • Pasadena, CA 91103 • 626.298.6931

www.offrampgallery.com