Austin Martin White
Tracing Delusionships
Petzel Gallery, New York
September 4 – October 18, 2025
Petzel presents Tracing Delusionships, an exhibition of new largescale paintings and works on paper by Philadelphia-based artist Austin Martin White. The show marks White’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition corresponds with the release of Austin Martin White’s first monograph.
Austin Martin White draws on various references to excavate the ways in which history can be bent, reassembled, or hallucinated. Among the most ambitious in scale White has completed to date, the artist debuts a new series which interprets etchings by 18th century Italian architect, artist, and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who fused real monuments and fictive views from antiquity. White probes the inspirational potential of a collapsed, classical past, summarized by Piranesi’s concept of “speaking ruins”: a description for architecture that conjures a world beyond its remains.
Interested in how these images traffic through time as empires decline and global powers shift, Austin Martin White warps, stretches, and splices Piranesi’s reproductions, investigating ruins as arbiters of historical memory. Crumbling arches and labyrinthine stairways, once etched in ink, are fractured and extruded by White through his signature process. Drawing from archival sources, he translates imagery into digital drawings, laser-cuts vinyl stencils, and pushes latex paint through mesh screens from behind. He renders his “Ruins” in maze-like, snaking estuaries of paint. Surfaces appear ridged and vascular, as if oozing from a primordial core.
Monumental in scale, these paintings conjure visions of fantastical follies—structures made not for function but for wonder—while also signaling scenes of industrial collapse or cities devastated by war. Saturating the present yet overlapping with centuries past, White’s images of wreckage become sites of projected anguish, longing, delusion, and desire.
Austin Martin White also turns to the legacy of Bob Thompson, an artist who reimagined the formal and conceptual boundaries of classical painting. Through his “After Thompson” works, White references La Mort des Enfants de Bethel (1964/1965), Thompson’s gouache rendering of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. White distorts Thompson’s composition further, reframing the plight of the innocents in a present tense. Figures appear ghost-like, as if excreted from the surface, and landscapes buzz with volatile, chromatic intensity—an afterlife of an image that resists repose.
Returning to artists like Thompson and Piranesi, Austin Martin White explores how both destabilize their sources—sometimes reverently, sometimes destructively. White embraces the fragment, sitting in the tension between structure and breakdown, past and present, image and aftermath.
Artist Austin Martin White
Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and earned an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Working with a variety of mediums including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.
White’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c and The Observer, among others.
Austin Martin White was included in the group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, New York in 2024, marking his first institutional presentation. Austin Martin White had his first solo exhibition at Petzel’s Upper East Side location.
PETZEL GALLERY
520 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001