James Little USA, b. 1952

This work belongs to James Little’s series of White Paintings. Topped with a glossy, vicious stratus of white oil paints, and pierced with a geometric lattice of voids, the surfaces of these paintings blaze with multitudes of swirling, prismatic rainbows. Like Little's companion series titled Black Stars, the White Paintings demonstrate Little's nuanced sensibility towards both formal aesthetics and socio-political subtext.

“The White Paintings are more or less experiments in color,” Little says. “The thing you see first is the last layer of paint, which is white. But if you look beyond the surface, within the squares and circles there’s a whole universe of activity. The paintings keep changing, keep engaging, and are animated. The title is catchy, and there’s a lot behind that. It’s where we live and how we live. It’s America. So I want to try to bring as much of that in as I can without sacrificing the integrity of what I’m trying to do.”