Austin Martin White - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

At the center of Austin Martin White's impressive body of work is the act of manipulating and reinterpreting history. Working with a variety of materials including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race, and postcolonialism. By pulling apart and reassembling received historical imagery, the artist destabilizes colonial and classist codes that run throughout Western art history. This first monograph on his paintings and works on paper shows the wide variety of subjects on which White brings this incisive method to bear; each chapter acquaints us with a different series in the artist's work through a brief introduction and a generous number of plates.

The monograph includes an essay by Johanna Fateman which elucidates the progression of White's practice, bringing into focus his history-spanning references and their close relationship to the process and form of the paintings. Fateman's deep dive into the work of Austin Martin White is accompanied by over 60 full-color reproductions of both paintings and works on paper, as well as detail images, installation shots, and photographs of the artist in his studio. Designed by Waterhouse Cifuentes Design, the monograph provides a comprehensive account of the artist's work from 2018 to the present.

About the Author

Working with a variety of mediums including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.

White's work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c and The Observer, among others.

White was included in the group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New York in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, New York in 2024, marking his first institutional presentation. White had his first solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery's Upper East Side location in September 2023, alongside a simultaneous solo show at Derek Eller Gallery. White had his first solo exhibition at Capitain Petzel in Berlin in 2022. He has also shown in group exhibitions at And Now in Dallas, at Derek Eller Gallery in New York alongside artist Kathia St. Hilaire, as well as at T293 in Rome, Italy and at Y2K group in New York.

Johanna Fateman is a New York-based writer, musician, and co-chief art critic for CULTURED magazine, where she is also commissioning editor of The Critics' Table, the magazine's new platform for art criticism. Previously, she was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, 4Columns, and Artforum (where she was a contributing editor). As a shortform reviewer, she wrote weekly for the New Yorker's Goings on About Town section; she also writes in-depth critical works.

Recent magazine pieces include a cover profile of Anne Imhof and a longform essay on Cameron Rowland (CULTURED); features on Barbara Kruger and Nicole Eisenman (Artforum); and columns on Greer Lankton and Tommy Kha (New Yorker). She was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers grant in 2014 and a Creative Capital grant in 2019.

She has also contributed essays to museum catalogues and monographs for artists such as Charles Atlas, Judith Bernstein, Judy Chicago, Donald Judd, and Hilary Pecis. She co-edited and wrote the introductory essay for the critically acclaimed anthology Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, published by semiotext(e) in 2019.

Her early artwork and writings were included in the 2024 exhibition "Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines" at the Brooklyn Museum, and her papers related to the punk feminism of the 1990s and '00s are preserved in the Riot Grrrl Collection of the Fales Library at New York University.