“We walked beside the river and spoke about our future”
Angus White
30th September - 11 October
Please Join us for the opening celebration Thursday 2nd October 6-8pm
“I was walking beside a river with one of my friends, who was reeling off a story I should remember. I couldn’t help but let my mind drift so far that I almost tripped over a person sitting by the river, staring into the sun reflecting off the water. They seemed just as startled as me, as if I had dragged them out of the water and shown them what land was for the first time. How could we both be on two different planets while standing on the same street? I tried to keep listening to the story being recounted. There was relaxation in the air. I love listening to stories from friends, but this time, now, it seemed like everyone—including me—was only concerned with trying to float away on the next sweet breath of summer wind that meandered through the streets.”
This body of work lingers in the melancholia of a summer scattered between places, much of it spent in an emptied Paris where entire quarters seemed abandoned, where people passed like fleeting apparitions. The paintings carry the rhythm of days without aim—days when the greatest decision is what to eat next, when one can jet off at the drop of a hat or call an old friend just to sleep in their spare room.
They speak to the strange tenderness of these lulls: watching the sunset from a balcony, feeling the dread of returning to work softened only by the thought that work will buy you the next holiday. These moments stretch time until it blurs, and it’s in this blur that memory, desire, and reverie take shape on the canvas.
Figures drift through the paintings like constellations, blurred and dissolving into abstraction. They hover between the intimacy of dreams and the collective pull of modern visibility—not the promise of celebrity, but the quieter, stranger condition of living in a world where each image, each fleeting gesture, is instantly cast into the endless archive of screens.
Like walking beside the river, these works hold the tension of pause and momentum, of solitude and shared presence. They invite us to dwell in the intervals where life loosens its grip, when boredom opens into possibility, and the future hovers just out of reach.
Angus White (b.1998, Melbourne, Australia) is a London based painter whose work explores the fleeting nature of human experience. Rooted in an architectural understanding of space and composition, his paintings blur the lines between form and figure, structure and spontaneity—translating the ephemeral rhythms of daily life into a visual lexicon of movement, tension, and stillness.
With a background in architecture and public art, Angus has developed a sensitivity to the way spaces shape perception. This awareness permeates his painting practice, where color and gesture construct environments that are both deeply personal and universally resonant. His recent work moves away from representation, instead distilling human presence into marks, traces, and textures—echoes of encounters, places, and sensations.
His evolution as a painter has been met with critical recognition. In 2023, he was awarded the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, as well as the ARM Prize for Architectural Excellence in 2019. Most recently Angus was awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Whales, a residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, creating a large body of work. Angus is currently pursuing his MA at the Royal College of Art in London.
