Jack White Has Been Making Sculpture and Art
For the previous 20 years, Jack White has been making sculpture and furnishings in relative privateness, a parallel observe working alongside one of the crucial celebrated careers in modern music. This spring, that modifications. These Thoughts May Disappear, opening at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery on 29 May 2026 and working till 13 September, marks the primary public exhibition of White’s visible artwork, a physique of labor that has been quietly growing its personal logic and ambition for years.
The exhibition, curated by Connor Hirst (Damien’s son) and Jack White, brings collectively sculptures produced from discovered objects, interactive works, installations and furnishings design throughout the complete span of the Newport Street areas. A spotlight is a remake of The Red Tree, a 2015 sculpture that takes a decaying tree and, via intervention, transforms it into one thing that reads as each monument and elegy, preserving the unique idea whereas revisiting it with the gap the intervening decadence has produced.
White’s visible observe is rooted, each actually and conceptually, in Detroit. Born there in 1975, he spent youth in Southwest Detroit and the Cass Corridor, a neighborhood that produced an influential group of artists working with industrial supplies, discovered objects and the detritus of a metropolis in financial disaster. Gordon Newton and Robert Sestok, two of the Cass Corridor’s most vital figures, are direct factors of reference for White’s sculptural work, and their relationships with each artists have prolonged to lively collaboration. He reimagined Nineteen Sixties guitar amplifiers with Newton, and commissioned Sestok to provide a mural for Third Man Records. The connections are each private and aesthetic.
White’s background in upholstery is equally foundational. He opened Third Man Upholstery in Detroit in 1996, a working store that gave him sensible fluency in manipulating supplies and a craftsman’s understanding of development that runs via every part he has made since. He describes his sculptural technique as Hardware Store Art. This time period captures one thing important about his method: assemblage and reappropriation utilizing resins, paints, epoxies and utilitarian discovered objects, constructing outward and upward from present supplies somewhat than carving into them. The emphasis is on addition somewhat than discount, accumulation somewhat than elimination, though the outcomes retain what he describes as a minimalist sensibility. Tools and weapons seem often, encased in epoxy and rendered static, their capabilities suspended whereas their types stay readable. Handmade axes and hatches generally stay moveable, resisting the fixity imposed by the opposite works.
The visible references White attracts on are broad and thought of. Mid-century fashionable furnishings design sits alongside De Stijl and Dada, a mix that displays a real engagement with the twentieth-century custom of discovering artwork within the supplies and processes of on a regular basis manufacturing. These aren’t passing references. They are the structural logic of a observe that has been growing, away from public view, for the higher a part of thirty years.
White has continued to discover his design instincts via the Third Man Records universe, the unbiased vinyl-focused report label he based in 2001, which has turn into as a lot a design observe as a music enterprise. From album graphics and images to the structure of the label’s areas and the design of audio gear, Third Man operates as an built-in aesthetic enterprise wherein the boundary between music and visible tradition is handled as a provocation somewhat than a given. For this exhibition, that world intersects with Hirst’s, with White collaborating with Hirst and different artists related to the Third Man orbit, a convergence of two figures who’ve every, of their respective fields, made the connection between commerce and artwork a central topic of their observe.
Newport Street Gallery, which Hirst opened in 2015 to exhibit works from his private assortment and to supply a platform for artists he admires, is a becoming venue for a debut of this sort. The area is massive, severe, and unintimidating in equal measure, and its program has constantly made area for work that sits outdoors typical art-world classes. An exhibition by a musician whose visible observe has been performed completely outdoors the general public gaze suits the gallery’s ethos extra comfortably than it would elsewhere in London.
Here is an inventory of Actors/Musicians who’ve turned their hand to creating artwork:
Dennis Hopper is a uncommon triple menace who achieved skilled popularity of his images, work, and sculptures.
Bob Dylan is a prolific painter and creates huge metalwork and iron sculptures, together with his Ironworks collection.
David Bowie was a educated artist who produced work, sketches, and sculptures that always served as blueprints for his numerous stage folks.
Lucy Liu reveals work, sculptures, and images—typically below the title Yu Ling—specializing in summary themes and discovered objects.
James Franco He works as a multimedia artist with a observe spanning portray, sculpture, images, and large-scale movie installations.
Jim Carrey Focuses deeply on portray and sculpture, utilizing massive canvases and blended media to specific political and private themes.
Brad Pitt has lately gained recognition for his sculpture work, debuting items product of plaster, wooden, and clay on the Sara Hildén Art Museum.
Brian Adams maintains a extremely profitable second profession as an expert style and portrait photographer for main magazines like Vogue.
Ronnie Wood is a classically educated painter whose portraits of the Rolling Stones and different musical icons are broadly collected.
Patti Smith He is famend for his minimalist drawings and his evocative black-and-white images, typically utilizing a classic Polaroid.
Adrian Brody is an lively painter whose vibrant works often discover environmental and social themes.
Robbie Williams creates work and digital artwork to course of his psychological well being and experiences within the highlight.
Ed Sheeran is one other musician who has turned to artwork. Jackson Pollock appears to be his inspiration.
Others embrace: Sylvester Stallone (summary work), Viggo Mortensen (portray/images), Shia LaBeouf (Conceptual work) and Anthony Hopkins. On the extra severe aspect, I’d add Tilda Swinton, Brian Eno and Jim Jarmusch.
But are they any good? I’ll go away you to resolve… I can not wait to learn Eddy Frankle’s assessment of this…
Admission is free.
These Thoughts May Disappear is at Newport Street Gallery, Newport Street, London SE11 6AJ, from 29 May to 13 September 2026, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to six pm.
