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Austin Martin White

Petzel is pleased to announce representation of artist Austin Martin White, with his first solo exhibition, Familiar Dysphoria, opening September 13th at Petzel’s Upper East Side location. In collaboration with Petzel, Derek Eller Gallery will simultaneously show an exhibition of White’s work, titled Lost in the Sauce, opening September 8th.

Austin Martin White - Familiar Dysphoria - Collect - Petzel Gallery
Buenaventura José Guiol, de español e india nace mestiza, c. 1770-1780

Buenaventura José Guiol, de español e india nace mestiza, c. 1770-1780

In eighteenth-century colonial Mexico, the ruling class of generational Spanish settlers sought to order identities in a way that reflected their interests and channeled the reality of mestizaje, or race mixing. They desired a hierarchy that organized Spaniards in a position over, first, mixed mestizos, then the Indigenous—who had been first slaughtered then subjugated, though legally speaking never enslaved—and at the bottom, Black people who had been enslaved. Through the application of the rudimentary science supported by European scholars—the eugenic fixers of the Enlightenment—as well as religious missionaries to the New World, the sistema de castas became a political and cultural rubric for classifying peoples by their relative proximity to or distance from whiteness.

Austin Martin White

Casta4

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

62 x 42 inches

157.5 x 106.7 cm

(AMW 23/029)

Austin Martin White

Casta4

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

62 x 42 inches

157.5 x 106.7 cm

(AMW 23/029)

Inquire

Austin Martin White

misguidance (After de Ibarra)

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

82 x 72 inches

208.3 x 182.9 cm

(AMW 23/019)

Austin Martin White

misguidance (After de Ibarra)

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

82 x 72 inches

208.3 x 182.9 cm

(AMW 23/019)

Inquire

Austin Martin White

Casta3

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

78 x 50 inches

198.1 x 127 cm

(AMW 23/028)

Austin Martin White

Casta3

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

78 x 50 inches

198.1 x 127 cm

(AMW 23/028)

Inquire

Austin Martin White

Two framed works (casta)

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

82 x 72 inches

208.3 x 182.9 cm

(AMW 23/004)

Austin Martin White

Two framed works (casta)

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

82 x 72 inches

208.3 x 182.9 cm

(AMW 23/004)

Inquire
Austin Martin White

WHATISTHISTHEN

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper 

35.75 x 30.5 inches

90.8 x 77.5 cm

(AMW 23/025)

Austin Martin White

WHATISTHISTHEN

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper 

35.75 x 30.5 inches

90.8 x 77.5 cm

(AMW 23/025)

Inquire
Austin Martin White

humiliatedhusband (after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

39.1 x 27.8 inches

99.4 x 70.6 cm

(AMW 23/023)

Austin Martin White

humiliatedhusband (after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

39.1 x 27.8 inches

99.4 x 70.6 cm

(AMW 23/023)

Inquire
Austin Martin White

likeaprizepig(after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

35.6 x 23.9 inches

90.5 x 60.8 cm

(AMW 23/022)

Austin Martin White

likeaprizepig(after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

35.6 x 23.9 inches

90.5 x 60.8 cm

(AMW 23/022)

Inquire
Austin Martin White

WHATISTHISTHEN

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper 

35.75 x 30.5 inches

90.8 x 77.5 cm

(AMW 23/025)

Austin Martin White

WHATISTHISTHEN

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper 

35.75 x 30.5 inches

90.8 x 77.5 cm

(AMW 23/025)

Austin Martin White

humiliatedhusband (after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

39.1 x 27.8 inches

99.4 x 70.6 cm

(AMW 23/023)

Austin Martin White

humiliatedhusband (after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

39.1 x 27.8 inches

99.4 x 70.6 cm

(AMW 23/023)

Austin Martin White

likeaprizepig(after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

35.6 x 23.9 inches

90.5 x 60.8 cm

(AMW 23/022)

Austin Martin White

likeaprizepig(after Ibarra)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

35.6 x 23.9 inches

90.5 x 60.8 cm

(AMW 23/022)

José de Ibarra, De indio y loba, lobo torna atras, c. 1725

José de Ibarra, De indio y loba, lobo torna atras, c. 1725

The genre of casta painting emerged to illustrate and help codify such logic. Genteel figurative compositions generally featured scrolls of text across the surface of a painting, sometimes also the titles of the works themselves, to offer equations that must have seemed at least superficially factual to their audience: De español e india nace mestiza (From Spaniard and Indian a Mestiza is born), as the title to Buenaventura José Guiol’s ca. 1770–80 painting goes. Another work by an unknown artist, dated ca. 1780, went further in its didactic function by painting the numbers one, two, and three next to two adults and a child in the composition to ensure there could be no ambiguity regarding this system of identification nor its mathematical reasoning.

Austin Martin White - Familiar Dysphoria - Collect - Petzel Gallery
José de Ibarra, De Mestizo, y Española, Castiza, c. 1725

José de Ibarra, De Mestizo, y Española, Castiza, c. 1725

Austin Martin White’s research into casta painting is a foundation for his newest body of work. Rather than serving as proof of a conviction about origin the images he makes incorporate and dissociate from their sources. This approach has a personal valence for the artist, whose father recently discovered their lineage was less straightforward than previously known. The premise of belonging becomes a font of anxiety, while a hierarchy of subjects dissolves into layers of pigment, acrylic medium, and spray paint across different substrates, including a screened mesh of the type more often used in construction or athletic gear.

Austin Martin White

castaset1

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, glow-in-the dark fabric, and nylon mesh

Set of 8 paintings; Overall: 117 x 89 inches; Each: 43 x 27 inches.

(AMW 23/042)

Austin Martin White

castaset1

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, glow-in-the dark fabric, and nylon mesh

Set of 8 paintings; Overall: 117 x 89 inches; Each: 43 x 27 inches.

(AMW 23/042)

Inquire

Austin Martin White

frame?(after de Mena and Barreda)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

38.4 x 29.25 inches

97.5 x 74.3 cm

(AMW 23/024)

Austin Martin White

frame?(after de Mena and Barreda)

2023

Ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper

38.4 x 29.25 inches

97.5 x 74.3 cm

(AMW 23/024)

Inquire

Austin Martin White

HIVE

2023

Ballpoint pen on paper

31.4 x 26.9 inches

79.7 x 68.3 cm

(AMW 23/026)

Austin Martin White

HIVE

2023

Ballpoint pen on paper

31.4 x 26.9 inches

79.7 x 68.3 cm

(AMW 23/026)

Inquire

Austin Martin White

Three framed works (casta)

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

82 x 72 inches

208.3 x 182.9 cm

(AMW 23/016)

Austin Martin White

Three framed works (casta)

2023

Acrylic medium, pigment, spray paint, vinyl, 3M reflective fabric, and nylon mesh

82 x 72 inches

208.3 x 182.9 cm

(AMW 23/016)

Inquire
Anónimo europeo, Trajes de los indios de la provincia de Mojos y Chiquitos [Bolivia], 1750/1830

Anónimo europeo, Trajes de los indios de la provincia de Mojos y Chiquitos [Bolivia], 1750/1830

One might naturally search for the eyes in a figure to try and identify with it, but the hardened nodules of White’s subjects tellingly fail to offer the reward of emotional insight when you meet their gaze, instead throwing the viewer back onto the paintings’ expansive fields of protrusions. Consider opacity maintained. A caste system, like the history of colonialization, becomes a backdrop in his paintings, just as it is the lurking backstory behind the way we live, or fail to live, today.

Austin Martin White - Familiar Dysphoria - Collect - Petzel Gallery

About Austin Martin White

Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and earned an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. 

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.

In addition to his forthcoming solo exhibitions at Petzel and 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.

Austin Martin White - Familiar Dysphoria - Collect - Petzel Gallery