Eric White: Vignettes & Mutations

GRIMM is pleased to present Vignettes & Mutations, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles–based artist Eric White on view from March 20 to May 2, 2026. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with GRIMM and his third solo exhibition at the New York gallery.

The exhibition brings together intimately scaled works that revisit and transmute details from more than two decades of the artist’s practice. Mining his output from 2003 to his New York exhibition in 2024, Vignettes & Mutations operates as a refracted retrospective. White has isolated specific details from earlier paintings and reinterpreted them, bringing past ideas into the present and allowing them to play against their former selves. Removed from their original narrative contexts, these fragments are altered and reconstituted as independent compositions.

The exhibition emerged from a period of reflection on White’s evolving practice. His past shows have often been conceptually layered, with images morphing and proliferating across a body of work. Here, he turns to moments that lingered in his imagination long after their initial realization. Many earlier paintings contained embedded ideas that could have unfolded further. By returning to these images and establishing a clear parameter—working from isolated details at their original scale—White creates a focused framework that offers him both structure and freedom. 

Each painting is densely rendered and unified by shared formal graphic elements. Typography appears throughout the exhibition in signage and logos, comics and title cards. This recurring presence creates a connective thread across disparate source material while underscoring White’s longstanding engagement with media, language, symbology, and constructed meaning. Though the imagery varies, each work contains at least one element that subtly connects it to another, forming a loose internal network of echoes.

Throughout his career, White has drawn from twentieth-century film, music, and pop culture to subvert dominant narratives. Warped screens, invented movie ephemera, album cover references, and ambiguous figures populate his compositions. These recurring motifs reflect his ongoing fascination with psychology, perception, and metaphysics. As White has noted, he is compelled by the idea that reality may be a constructed illusion and that time is not linear but overlapping.

In Vignettes & Mutations, time folds back onto itself. A revised detail of a painting from 2003 resonates alongside imagery developed more recently. Freed from their original frameworks, these images take on new ambiguity and intensity. Rather than summarizing the past, the exhibition activates it, demonstrating how ideas persist, evolve, and accumulate new meaning. Across a twenty-year span of work, White converts existing fragments into new portals, revealing a practice defined not by repetition, but by continual transformation.

About the artist

Eric White (b. in 1968 Ann Arbor, MI, US) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. He served as adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts from 2006 - 2013. In 2010, White received a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been featured in exhibitions in museums including the Laguna Art Museum in California (US); Long Beach Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA (US); Museo de la Ciudad de México (MX); De Bond Museum in Bruges (BE); MACRO Museum in Rome (IT) and The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD (US).

Selected exhibitions include Deep Color, Halsey McKay Gallery, NY (US), 2025; Melted City 5, Blanc Gallery, Quezon City (PH), 2025; Outside In, Torrance Art Museum, CA (US), 2025; Local Programming, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2024; The Moon and I, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2023; and The Visual Adventures of Robert Williams, Orange County Center For Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA (US), 2022.