Austin Martin White @ Petzel Gallery, NYC - "Tracing Delusionships" Exhibition

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

www.petzel.com

Heimo Zobernig @ Petzel Gallery, New York

Heimo Zobernig: chess painting & nework
Petzel Gallery, New York
January 18 – February 17, 2018

At Petzel's Chelsea location, chess painting—the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery—recasts Heimo Zobernig’s 2017 show at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Making use of the gallery’s architecture, Zobernig allows viewers to confront the constructed, at times theatrical, experience of visiting an art exhibition.

Heimo Zobernig creates a discrete installation that includes a series of eight white large-scale, primed, monochrome canvases, hung in scacchic configuration atop rolls of black photography paper. Repurposed mobile podiums with cozy, black-and-white checkered faux-fur blankets on top, offer platforms like daybeds, which invite the visitors to stay within the gallery rooms. Taking in the light and architecture of the space, they become part in the figure-ground-relationship of the spatial configuration.

In nework—the artist’s first solo show at Petzel's Upper East Side location, Heimo Zobernig exhibits nine new text paintings. The sans serif typeface, Helvetica has been used by Zobernig since 1986 in his catalog and poster designs. For a 1993 group exhibition Heimo Zobernig, using orange, brown, gray, black, and white, subdivided the letters of the show’s main title REAL into four fields, in reference to Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE paintings. One year later, the first REAL pictures were produced in the same colors. Bit by bit, Heimo Zobernig extended the color scale of the REAL images and years later added the word EGAL (German for “whatever”), which fills the canvas to the same extent as REAL. The words appear written into one another, and thus their meaning disappears, and a new, interpretive zero point of complex construction has been reached.

Heimo Zobernig’s practice is grounded in an awareness of his position as an artist and producer in the broader context of culture. His work is framed by the impact Modernism has had on the trajectory of art history and a questioning of the institutional mechanisms that support the exhibition of artwork.

HEIMO ZOBERNIG was born in Austria in 1958 and lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna from 1977–1980, and at the city’s College of Applied Arts from 1980–1983. Zobernig has exhibited widely in various international shows including solo presentations at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Malmö Konstall, Sweden (2016). In 2015, his work was presented in the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Other individual museum exhibitions include the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2012); a show which later traveled to the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria (2013); Kunsthalle Zürich and the Essl Museum, Vienna (2011); and two related solo presentations at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon (2009) and the Tate St. Ives (2008). In 2010 Zobernig received the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in Vienna and the Roswitha Haftmann-Preis in Zürich, in 2016. The same year, a Catalogue raisonné of his designs of books, posters and catalogues was published by the Malmö Konstall and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.

HEIMO ZOBERNIG

chess painting

456 West 18th Street

nework

35 East 67th Street

PETZEL GALLERY
www.petzel.com

Jorge Pardo: Self Portraits @ Petzel Gallery, New York

Jorge Pardo: Self Portraits
Petzel Gallery, New York
Through January 13, 2018

Petzel Gallery presents a solo exhibition by artist, sculptor, architect, and all-around polymathic “Genius” (2010 MacArthur Fellowship recipient), JORGE PARDO. This is his ninth exhibition with the gallery and first painting show—but don’t expect oil on canvas.

Candid snapshots of Jorge Pardo in workaday situations—man-spreading in a chair, strolling down the street, posing in Brazilian swim trunks—taken by friends, family, studio assistants, as well as up-close-and-personal Selfies, are the foundation for these 15 new paintings. And then the metamorphosis begins, simultaneously upending what defines a painting and a self portrait. Amalgamating craftsmanship and computerized manipulation with a range of media, Pardo creates an intricate, hybridized fusion of painting and sculpture.

The images are bastardized—blown-up, engraved, laser-cut, hand-painted and back-lit with LEDs, to produce, in some cases, vast ornamental objects. Tiers of milled, perforated wood and Plexiglas overlap and interact on a relief which dissipates and parodies both self and portrait. Transparency, light, and color add further layers of complexity to these works—when illuminated the shapes, patterns and subjects within the paintings alter. A larger transformation occurs when the works are hung from the ceiling; the paintings morph into seemingly weightless light-boxes.

Jorge Pardo’s self portraits—sourced from prosaic material, refined and abstracted by his practice—expand the artist’s exploration into questions of composition, forms of display and classification within this traditional genre. The paintings in Self Portraits double as sculptures, triple as ornaments, quadruple as lamps—forcing a reexamination of the everyday object.

PETZEL GALLERY
456 W 18th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.petzel.com

John Stezaker @ Petzel Gallery, New York - The Voyeur: Photoroman Collages, 1976–1979

John Stezaker
The Voyeur: Photoroman Collages, 1976–1979
Petzel Gallery, New York
Through January 6, 2018

Petzel Gallery presents a solo exhibition by London-based artist JOHN STEZAKER. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and his first at our Upper East Side location.

John Stezaker first came across photoromans on a trip to Italy in 1973. Attracted by their modern, colorful aesthetic he began collecting them, but it was not until he discovered the Spanish iterations that John Stezaker’s collages took off. The female-orientated romantic plots of the black and white Spanish photoromans were similar to their Italian counterparts, but where the Iberian ones differed, was in their slight bent toward soft porn; seemingly with a male audience in mind. Titillating shower scenes and other narrative intrusions often culminated in violence. As the male invaded the female domain, either accidentally or secretly as a voyeur, the intrusion was often mirrored by a visual disruption of the vertical grid of frames on the page. “Sex and love,” John Stezaker writes, “seemed incompatible in these claustrophobic boxed narratives”. This unsettlingly and alluring dichotomy became the driving force for the photoroman collages John Stezaker produced in the latter part of the 1970s.

The kiss—central to the photoroman narrative, and also as John Stezaker notes, “cinema’s most ubiquitous still image of itself”—dominates these collages. As a euphemism for sexual consummation, the kiss simultaneously represents sex and is part of it. “I thought of this as a kind of leak between the simulacral and the real,” Stezaker explains, “a realization that in order to enact a kiss, the actors must kiss, converting a stereotypical trope into an object of voyeurism…Where cinema promises a space in which reality and illusion seamlessly dissolve, the photoroman was an opportunity for me to explore the seams.”

JOHN STEZAKER was born in 1949 in England. His work appeared recently in the 19th Biennale of Sydney in Australia (2014). Institutional solo exhibitions include the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2013) and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, (2011), which traveled to MUDAM Luxembourg and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. His work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Collection, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Ellipse Foundation, Cacais. He lives and works in London.

PETZEL GALLERY
35 E 67th Street, New York, NY 10065
www.petzel.com