James White is well known for his black and white, meticulously crafted paintings of quiet, familiar situations and ordinary subjects. At the core of White's practice is the slow transformation of his own snapshots of daily life into paintings. By encasing the paintings in vitrine-like perspex boxes the artist emphasizes the objecthood of the work, at the same time denying the viewer a direct relationship with the painted surface. In these crystalline paintings emptied of colour, objects are reduced to the core of their essence and are turned from the tools of the everyday into symbolic fragments of a life - mysterious icons of the familiar.
For the first time in the UK, Siegfried Contemporary will also present White's new photographic work - Abstract Thoughts. These images originate from the artists personal archive of source material for his paintings. Now this photographic archive has been revisited by White, and, through subtle interventions, recontextualised into a new body of work that offers an uncanny glimpse into the process of his art.