Tim White-Sobieski is a video and installation artist based in New York and Berlin. He was educated as an architect and dedicated himself to visual art and filmmaking, exploring the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, video, video installations and light installations throughout his career. He began showing in New York in the early 1990s with his "Blue Paintings."Nancy Princenthal. Tim White in Blue, Catalogue article, NY 1995 Emphasis on the role of the subconscious in his paintings had affinities with visual abstractionism and literary existentialism.
He has consistently been at the technological forefront of video and light art, being called a "video maverick" and "an abstract "'painter of motion.'"
Life and career
Tim White-Sobieski was born in 1961 and emigrated to the United States in 1993.
Analysis of work
Much of his work draws from literary work that has inspired the artist, and he has often featured icons of American literature in his installations.Lehmann, Ulrike, Floating Forms (May 16, 2006) Writers such as Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren all have a permanent presence in Tim White-Sobieski’s oeuvre.Zybok, Oliver, Idyll: Illusion and Delusion, 2007
Music and sound in the projects
Musically, White-Sobieski composes most of his own film and video soundtracks,Traces of Light, Fernández-Cid, Miguel, 2003 but also incorporates the work of his contemporaries such as Brian Eno, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, and Steve Reich, as well as classical masters such as Purcell, Pergolesi, and Bach.
Important art commissions
White-Sobieski has been commissioned by LVMH multiple times,Anna Karnick, Whitewall Magazine , Summer 2010. p50 and in 2005, was invited to create an artwork for the new Louis Vuitton Flagship Store on Champs-Elysses in Paris alongside artists James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson.Anne Petersen, Kunst und Mode sind eine gute Partie, Die Welt, December 12, 2008Susanne Haase, Vuitton und die nackten Frauen, Stern, October 2, 2006 The project consisted of a 24-meter programmed fiber-optics video wall. Another colossal video wall was installed at the Petit Palais for the celebration of the launch. This was a unique cooperation of the three artists.Lutyens, D. (January 01, 2006). Art Review, p88 In 2006, the Louis Vuitton Company invited Tim White-Sobieski back to participate in an exhibition entitled "Icons", an interpretation of the iconic logo-bags.Gerschel, Stephane and Marc Jacobs. Louis Vuitton: ICONS. Assouline, New York, 2007 Other artists included Marc Jacobs, Zaha Hadid, Ugo Rondinone, Sylvie Fleury, Shigeru Ban, Robert Wilson and Andrée Putman.
In 2008, White-Sobieski created and engineered the video installation Water and Earth for a video wall with 144 synchronized vertical LCD monitors for Gimpo (Kimpo) Airport in Seoul, Korea. The artist continued developing new methods of controlling video with the purpose of integrating a moving image within architectural interiors and displaying it on any shapes, forms and materials.
Collections
The artist’s inventory of video works currently enlists more than 60 titles, with multi-channel synchronized video installations and stand-alone single theatrical presentations. His video, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation work belongs to the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; CGAC Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Denver Art Museum, Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain; Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, Turkey; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santander, Spain; Aena Foundation - FUNDACIÓN AENA, Madrid, Spain;Noelia Camacho, The Contemporary Art of the last 50 years Takes Off in the Centro del Carmen, Las Provincias, October 23, 2015Exposición de arte contemporáneo Espacios de Tránsito, de la colección Aena Stiftung kunst:raum Sylt Quelle, Germany; Nomas Foundation, Rome, Italy; and Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Germany.
Works
Video installations
Moving Paintings/Moving Drawings (1993–present)
Moving Paintings and Moving Drawings projects were a series of experiments in image animation which were based partially on Lingo scripting language that was used in Macromedia applications. Concomitant with his animation work, the artist became especially interested in the musical architecture of silence of John Cage and in response to Cage's objective to look through sounds and not at them, White-Sobieski created his infinite animations of paintings and drawings as complements to an artwork.For the Birds, John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston, Boyars, 1981 White-Sobieski wrote the scripts for programming infinite ways of controlling behavior of shapes, colors and image parameters in a video frame (and in a digital image if not video). The influence of contemporary experimental music has continued to have a great effect White-Sobieski’s work, and composers like Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, David Byrne, and Robert Fripp have all appeared in his later projects.
One of the most successful experiments in combining Moving Paintings animation principles with real-time video editing/rendering technique was the project "I Repeat Myself When Under Stress," 1999,Homage to Robert Fripp, soundtrack from King Crimson’s "Indiscipline" ("Discipline," 1981) exhibited in New York, Chicago and Turin. Later, the same methods were developed in hand-rendered films from the project. Almost each video frame of the series was hand-drawn, and, when assembled, created semi-abstract moving compositions. These projects were critically acclaimed at the Prague Biennale (2003), Lyon Biennale (2003), and Bucharest Biennale (2004).
Time of Adolescence Series (1998–2006)
Confession (2000–2002), Before They Were Beatles (2004) and Sweet Dreams (2002) developed the subjects of genetic memory and the theme of war.Artpulse Magazine, with Hans Op de Beeck, Fall 2011 The videos aim to assert the postulation that "memory is perhaps genetically transferred from generation to generation."Tom Breidenbach, Tim White: Confession, exhibition catalog, NY 2001 Confession had a multi-channel narrative sequence and examined migrant literary characters which also appeared in Closer to Fall, Awakening, Route 17N, and The Sound and the Fury.
In 2007, Tim White completed a series of large scale photographs and a video titled Awakening and in 2008, as an expansion on the same theme, Route 17 North. The series’ near-repetition rhythm reveals an image of an American youth at the beginning of the 21st century, in the world of post-modern simulacra. Both of the videos and photographic series demonstrate the influence of American literature on the artist. A short (20 min) multi-channel film The Sound and the Fury followed in 2009, named after the first part of Faulkner’s novel. The first version of the film was shown in Barcelona as Seventh Heaven (based on the subtitle of the literary work, April Seventh, 1928). The work exhibited in the US was received as "astounding."Lauren Meir, A Light in the Dark: The Innovative Kunsthalle Detroit Museum, MutualArt.com, September 7, 2011
Terminal Series (2000–2005)
The Terminal Series consists of a series of videos Terminal by Day (I), Terminal at Night (II), Terminal Dream (III), On the Wing (IV), and Terminal Heart (V)). Terminal (I) originated immediately after the events of September 11 in New York City. The artist's studio was located directly across the street from the WTC and he barely got out in time to escape. The loss of much of his artwork and the possible loss of life had a fundamental impact on his creativity and artistic vision, spawning the Terminal Series.
Between 2004 and 2006, Tim White-Sobieski created several abstract-figurative video compositions: New York City Suite, Vertigo, and Desire among them. The artist continued working in the direction of music-visual synthesis, developing new methods and algorithms to generate color, rhythm and animations based on sound parameters, further developing ideas that were explored in the Moving Paintings projects, using complementing soundtracks by Brian Eno, Robert Fripp's "frippertronics," and experiments of John Cage.
Deconstructed Cities (2005–2014)
Between 2005-2014, White-Sobieski created a series of films and images of deconstructed cityscapes, eliminating distinctions between design, painting, photography and architecture (New York City Suite (2005), Deconstructed Cities (2007), London, (2007), Katrina, (2008), and Deconstructed Reality(2009)). The first city-related photo-video project, New York City Suite, was shown in galleries and museums in 2006, as well as ArtMiami 2007.Walter Robinson, MIAMI MYASTHENIA, ArtNet.com 2007 There, the artist not only explored the structures of New York's landscape, the face of the city, in concrete, steel, and glass, but he also offered a psychological portrait of New York City residents he saw in the streets, neither friends nor important personae. Based on images of many metropolitan cities of the world, Deconstructed Reality followed.Judith H. Dobrzynski, , June 9, 2011 This project is ongoing and ultimately planned to include images of many global metropolises such as Paris, Madrid, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
The videos Vertigo (2005) and New York City Suite were created based on similar principles of compositions as in the previous "moving drawings" projects, where the final rendered video composition was digitally assembled from hundreds of video clips and images from the artist's data bank.TIM WHITE-SOBIESKI: MOVING HAPPENING, Olivier Houg Gallery, 2007 The projects were subsequently shown at the Contemporary Art Museum Malaga, ARTIUM Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, included in the exhibition "En torno a lo Transparente"Bonet, Juan Manuel and Alfonso de la Torre. EN TORNO A LO TRANSPARENTE. Galería Miguel Marcos, Madrid, 2008 in coincidence with ARCO Madrid, International Contemporary Art Fair,Arte catalán en el escaparate, HoyesArte.com February 21, 2014On Colour, escaparates con el color de ARCOmadrid 2015, Revista de Arte, February 23, 2015 and the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, Spain.LABoral presenta una selección de la colección olorVISUAL, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial InfoENPUNTO, July 10, 2014
Nebulas And My Other Galaxies (2008–2011)