LOS ANGELES, CA.- Shulamit Nazarian announced representation of New York-based artist Wendy White. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Racetrack Playa, features new paintings, sculptures, pigment prints, and a site-specific installation. The exhibition takes its name from a three-mile dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park where sliding rocks or “sailing stones” have inscribed mysterious linear imprints on the landscape. Using this scarred landscape as a metaphor for our current times, the works in Racetrack Playa explore power, entitlement, and imperialism via the aesthetics and evolution of American car culture.
The paintings and sculptures of New York-based Wendy White reference iconic branding against a spectrum of color. White’s work evokes an acute sense of nostalgia; luminous hues conjure bright, sun-drenched surf and skate culture and become a backdrop for longing and melancholy. Airbrushing recalls the immediacy of spray-painted abandoned pools and storefronts in Southern California as well as the alleyways adjacent to the artist's Brooklyn-based studio–– recording a clash of youth culture and consumerism. White’s frenetic scripts, confident in their saturation and gesture, live alongside a smattering of commercial logos, both of which hover over ghostly color fields.
Wendy White (b. 1971, Deep River, CT). White earned an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2003 and a BFA from Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA in 1993. White’s works have been featured in group exhibitions at M Woods, Beijing; The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan (both 2015); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2011); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2010) and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009.) Solo and two-person exhibitions include Cabinet, Milan with Brian Calvin (2017); VAN HORN, Düsseldorf (2012, 2017); David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2015); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2010, 2013); Leo Koenig, New York (2008, 2010 and 2012); and Savannah College of Art & Design with José Parlá (2012) among many others. White’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art Papers, Artforum, Art in America, New York Magazine. White lives and works in New York City.
