ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TOMMY WHITE

October 15 through November 12, 2005

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15, 6-8 pm

Harris Lieberman is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Tommy White. White’s work mines the vocabulary of historical painting using gesture and virtuoso paint handling to create raw, challenging, emotionally charged narrative. His heroic paintings of disembodied figures in abstract landscapes blur the boundary between beauty and the grotesque. The works emanate from a reservoir of personal memories, yet they transcend the artist’s own experience to speak to a more universal range of human emotions including loss, longing, and desire.

White challenges many of our expectations of and assumptions about contemporary art. Ambitious in scale, subject matter, and technique, his paintings are imbued with sincerity and seriousness and are completely without irony. While his imagery can be unsettling, explicit, and even confrontational, White’s paintings don’t rely on shock value and resist quick interpretation. Rather, they reveal themselves slowly, and thus demand an ongoing commitment from the viewer.

Tommy White was born in 1970 in Kingsville, Texas. He received his M.F.A from Massachusetts College of Art. In 2004, he participated in an a project at the Wrong Gallery. This is his first solo exhibition.