American musician Jack White will present his artwork to the public for the first time at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London. The exhibition, titled “These Thoughts May Disappear,” will run from May 29th through September 13th and include sculptures, interactive works, installation, and furniture design.
White is best known as the guitarist and lead vocalist of the rock duo The White Stripes. While he is now based in Nashville, it is the artist’s native Detroit that informs his visual work, along with mid-century modern furniture, local Detroit Cass Corridor artists including Gordon Newton and Robert Sestok, and the De Stijl and Dada movements. He refers to his artistic practice as “Hardware Store Art,” which fuses carpentry, upholstery, assemblage, and the reappropriation of found materials. He has long maintained an upholstery practice and opened his own shop, Third Man Upholstery, in Detroit in 1996.
The exhibition will feature a new version of White’s 2015 sculpture, The Red Tree, which transforms a dying tree into a sculpture by covering it in oil-based fire engineered exterior paint. The work slowly decays and takes on a new form over time.
Other works in the show will incorporate tools, weapons, household equipment, and more found objects that White has suspended in epoxy, as well as planks of wood painted in alternating stripes of black, goldenrod, cherry red, electric green, and cerulean. And in one piece, the artist has gathered what appear to be orange traffic markers into a cone formation, their bases attached to a wooden pallet. The composition evokes a bonfire.
“As an artist it is your job not to take the easy way out. I want to be turned on when I listen to an artist speak: I want them to show something that no one else is doing,” White said in a 2018 interview with The Guardian.
