In The News : Billy White Coming To America
In case you this missed this terrific piece (from Sept 2018) about Billy and his work:
Coming to America at Shrine marks Billy White’s well-deserved inaugural solo exhibition in New York, offering an exuberant selection of recent work; the paintings and sculptures currently on view dynamically illustrate White’s definitive creative focus and sustained capacity for fearless reinvention. For over twenty years, White’s portraits have directly reflected his enduring personal fascinations and artistic influences, through numerous iterations of specific personalities borrowed from popular culture and art history.
Throughout this exhibition, the joy and wonder White finds through art-making is obvious and infectious. He slowly and deliberately applies idiosyncratic strokes of vibrant acrylic, rendering loose forms with a striking physicality and disarming sincerity. These paintings exhibit an easy confidence and sense of humor similar to that of Katherine Bradford’s swimmers; less concerned with accuracy, White is instead intent on capturing the essence of his subjects in a bright palette redolent of his primary creative inspiration, Van Gogh (who appears in two remarkably different portrayals here). Robust figures are surrounded by imperfect, densely layered fields of color (predominantly in bold blues and greens). Abundant are motifs that frequently recur in his work – hyperbolic bicep muscles and facial features, gesticulating elastic limbs, and a variety of hats. Untitled works, such as a straight-faced, bug-eyed character wearing a fez or female in profile with prominent red lips, leave identities anonymous, whereas Fred Flintstone’s iconic black-spotted orange tunic and blue tie are immediately recognizable.
