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White:Work

Dates
01.10.2019 | 16.11.2019
Gallery
London
File
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Massimo De Carlo presents White:Work, a new exhibition by McArthur Binion in our London gallery. Throughout his fifty-year practice of assemblage painting, Binion has continually defied classification as an artist. Terms such as abstraction and minimalism have often been applied to his paintings, however Binion’s oeuvre resists such rigid categorisations.

Through the artist’s extensive career, Binion has developed a complex practice, incorporating interwoven personal memories with historical recollection bound by his experience of America in the past, by layering paint and personal memorabilia onto the surface of the work. The artist presents a new series of work, predominantly whitewashed (in the most literal sense), using gestures from the artist’s canon. White:Work is a departure in tonal quality of the solemn hues that dictated the prior DNA (2017) series, when the works made their international debut at the Venice Biennale. In this new exhibition, the grids that create the skeletal structure foundational to Binion’s practice become enveloped in a soft overlay of the colour white, yet subtly remaining at the forefront of the works.

Binion’s works are deeply personal, and the obsessive, exhaustive process of manual labour is inherent in the furrow of grids that dominate the board. Binion fuses personal documents to the boards prior to applying oil paint stick. By doing so, the artist asserts his own existence, whereas the layers of paint encompass the artists’ experience with authority and the art world in the U.S. The intricate surfaces of the boards become abstract shapes and motives: the artist’s archival belongings, that can only be seen when in close proximity to the work, are transformed by the paint into weightily textured patterns and reflect the influence of modernism in Binion’s practice.

The off-white, faded brown and pinkish hues combine earthy lattices next to an expanse of white; transforming the colour white, often conceived as a lack of, into the tonal emphasis of the exhibition. White:Work (black) stands out from the rest of the series, a duo chrome of apposing black to white. Since black comes from the absence of light, and white symbolically is the absence of colour, the duality of this pairing is ever so rarely accidental, verging on brash in contrast to the rest of the pieces.

White:Work presents itself as a muted journey, embodying the essence of Binion’s practice: infusing layers of personal history under the painstaking grids of white and off-white tones. Binion’s work speaks a language of subtlety and sophistication, but through decades of repetition it has matured to a fluency and eloquence that speaks through weightily textured patterns and a post-minimal allure.

The Artist

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McArthur Binion

McArthur Binion (b. 1946, Macon, Georgia) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.


Since the 1970’s, he has sought an alternative to minimalist art, through his personal philosophy of the pictorial grids fused with his archival belongings, such as the pages of his phone books, personal family photographs, or found documents from the history of the Afro-American community. Binion’s reduced combination of colors and forms enclose not only formal mastery but also layers of meaning, beginning with his search for modernist abstract painting’s legacy in relation to a wider context, that of the need of human society to leave traces of itself and, at the same time, to project itself into the future.


McArthur Binion’s work is strongly political, although very subtle. In fact, curator Lowery Stokes Sims once described Binion’s DNA series as ‘notions of selfa wareness and self- discovery, a conscious reflection on himself and to the historical discourse he has contributed to’. McArthur Binion’s 40-year career has been a continual investigation of abstract painting. The artist distinctive insertion of narrative and personal history and his emphasis on content differentiates his work from a more traditional minimalist practice. Binion’s works have been prominently included in the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel.


Binion’s work is featured in several public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; Strauss Family Collection, Santa Fe; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo.