Autokennel

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Wendy White.

For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wendy White has produced a body of work that is visually striking, physically confrontational and intellectually engaging. White’s compositions utilize a distinctive abstract language that alludes to the bombardment of the everyday.  Urban sprawl, space junk, graffiti, buried hazardous material, and the accumulation of refuse are punctuated by heavy black areas that map a direct trail from the ubiquitous to the subconscious.

Unafraid to conjure real feeling and emotion in these works, White gives new form to the bombast of rock concerts and the mass elation of sports arenas. Built organically and intuitively, these works balance accident and scrappy paint handling with compositional coherence. While White seems to work with reckless abandon, her off-kilter compositions prove well considered with time, though perhaps deliberately confounding. Just when one begins to get involved in a lush patch of painterly abstraction, a field of blank white canvas, almost large enough to topple the composition, is encountered.  Flatness combats depth, black is balanced against white, and fluorescent colors fade and emerge on top of a surface that is consistently finessed.

Wendy White has an MFA from Rutgers University. She has been honored with several awards including a 2005 George & Helen Segal Foundation Grant and a 2003 Space Program Studio Grant from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York, NY. She has had previous solo exhibitions at Sixtyseven in New York and Solomon Projects in Atlanta.  Recent group exhibitions include Galerie Markus Winter in Berlin, Thrust Projects in New York and Galeria Moriarty in Madrid, where she is preparing for a solo exhibition in 2009. Wendy White lives and works in New York City.