Derek Eller Gallery

About the Gallery
Founded in Chelsea in 1997, Derek Eller Gallery's mission is to promote emerging artists, champion under-recognized established artists, and present alternative art-historical narratives. Exhibiting work in a range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the gallery represents a multigenerational roster of contemporary artists from across the United States and abroad, including Alyson Shotz, David Kennedy Cutler, Steve DiBenedetto, Nancy Shaver, D-L Alvarez, and Michelle Segre. The gallery also works with Karl Wirsum of the legendary Chicago group the Hairy Who, whose first New York exhibition in over two decades was held at the gallery in 2010, and recently staged a survey of ceramics by Peter Shire, a former member of the iconic design collective Memphis. In 2016 the gallery relocated to the Lower East Side, occupying a renovated garage space at 300 Broome Street.

About the presentation
Derek Eller Gallery will present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Austin Martin White. Pushing bright, sometimes day-glo paint through a digitally cut vinyl template, White composes luminous narratives set against dark backdrops. Ruminating on personal history and mining archival research, White investigates issues of race, identity, and the historical weight of colonialism. His recent research has focused on the colonial genre of casta painting, produced in 18th-century Mexico to illustrate and codify the racial hierarchies imposed by the ruling class of generational Spanish settlers. In response, White’s images dissociate from their sources, dissolving any identification into layers of pigment and screened mesh.