DAVID BEN WHITE


studied at the Chelsea College of Art and the Central Saint Martin College of Art

lives and works in London, UK

Favourite book: Current favourite is Clothes Music Boys by Viv Albertine. Amazing book. I recommend it to everyone.

Favourite record: My current favourite listening is Bruckner's 7th Symphony, conducted by Karl Bohm with the Vienna Philharmonic. It is my favourite interpretation of this incredible work. I love this.

Favourite travel destination: I just came back from Madeira, which I really enjoyed. However, the destination that has held the most power over me is Sicily. I really love the crazy complexity of its cultural ingredients. From the Moorish influence, through to the legacy of the Mafia, it is an exciting and intoxicating place.

 

What can visitors expect from your current exhibition „Outside Inside“?

This show is about time and how we are now able to enter into a conversation with the legacy of modernist design and thinking, which we might not have been able to have before. For me, this leads to questioning its overtly masculine, patriarchal agenda. I want to think about how space and design can impact on our sense of who we are.

For a painter, you are very occupied with the history and theory of sculpture, design and architecture. What fascinates you most about the interaction between the fine arts?

That these connections offer me a future with my work and research practise. I am personally tired of fine art as a self-contained, self-involved vessel. For me, it is only through extending outside of this self-importance that something interesting can happen. This integration of design, architecture and interior design helps my works find its language and focus.

How would you describe your working process?

Generally, I combine reading and thinking with sketches, designs and installation ideas. They all evolve at the same time until I find a title that holds my attention and a conceptual area that seems fertile. Then I work to try and capture those ideas in form.

In your personal text on the current exhibition you talk about the missing recognition of works done by female Bauhaus artists. Tell me more about your personal favourite projects, which works would you like to be known better and exhibited more often?

Funnilly enough, most of my favourite examples come from outside the legacy of the Bauhaus. Like Margaret Schutte-Lihotzky's kitchen design in Frankfurt from 1926- one of my obsessions. Eileen Grey's house E1027 and the fate it received from Le Corbusier's crazed murals: that fascinates me. Probably the most important artist for me is Sonya Delaunay. One particular project is her interior design, costume design and furniture design for Rene Semptier's Le P'tit Parigot from 1926. It amazes and inspires me in equal measure.

You initially started your career as a musician. How does this phase still influences you and your work?

I think I was far more intuitive as a musician than I am as an artist. I came out of punk and the idea that you could get on a stage and just do it. As an artist, that sense of playfulness is still there, but balanced by a more integrated technical and intellectual support that came out of really trying to be as clear as I could be, in what I was trying to say with the work.

During these last days in Vienna, what did you enjoy the most? Which current show is a must-see, what is your all time favourite place to go?

I'm really excited to see the new show at mumok ' We Pioneers'. That sounds like a really good show to see. In terms of being in Vienna, I've really enjoyed the hospitality of the Gasthof Schwabl Wirt, around the corner from where I'm staying in Erdbergstraße.

 

May 2016