Anthony White - The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry

Informality is proud to present The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry by Paris based, Australian artist, Anthony White. The artist’s first solo show in the UK. The exhibition comprises recent work reviewing ideas about civil disobedience and its correlation to contemporary late capitalism. In the exhibition, Anthony White revisits themes of involuntary detention, injustice, migration, and reflects upon the effects of a Western capitalist civilisation in our modern environment.

The contemporary experience of emerging discrepancies in society is becoming culturally relevant, the latest exhibition questions, how does social unrest affect creative movements? It’s through the artist recapturing the radical act of the gestural mark that White invites us to consider how later capitalism and democracy are failing, reflecting on ideas of justice and unequal punishment.

White’s work draws from earlier activist artists such as Yves Klein and Rotraut and the post-war Japanese Gutai movement, but the primary motivation behind recent work is Michel Foucault’s cornerstone postmodern text “Discipline and Punish” (1977). The artist believes it

is fundamental to raise questions about surveillance, detainment and injustice and invites us to think about different states of being, using his practice as a vehicle for philosophy and ultimately emancipation.

In his latest work White combines important forms of analogue communication including posters of advertising and musical acts from the Paris metro. Drawing from the urban cultural history of Paris, the artist uses these reversed metro “affiches” to build the image, tearing, re-crop- ping and utilising painterly interventions acting as a form of dissent.

The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry utilises materials tagged and altered by anonymous authors which symbolising collectivity in the community and highlights the increased need for collective types of communication, reinforcing the fact that we are interdependent upon one another.

White asserts the role of the artist as inherently political and urges us to consider the role of artistic interventions in the current climate.