Demimondaine

Pae White’s exhibition title lends itself to the French demi-monde or “half-world”, a popular phrase at the turn of the early twentieth century characterizing those living opulent, pleasure-driven lifestyles. The derivative demimondaine spoke of the women that lived on the fringe of respectable society, straddling the standards of the “real-world”. Their way of life a challenge of the status quo but existing within the con nes of those very ideals – a controlled excess, a chaos within boundaries.

  Pae White’s work utilizes both the most advanced technology and skilled artisans to emphasize the simultaneous limitations and intricacies of each and to contort the connotations of the functional versus the decorative. White’s monumental new, digitally woven tapestries are the scale of backdrops, suggesting the stage-like quality of our own existence.

Pae White’s sculptural still-life works pull their forms from a library of digitally-dimensional clip-art meant to exist in the virtual worlds of video games and animations. Pae White’s interest in the discrepancies and individuality of masterful yet hand-wrought production is demonstrated by the four marble popcorn sculptures on view within the gallery. Four craftsmen studied the organic abstractions and translated their interpretations in marble.

until 9 September 2017
Pae White. Demimondaine
kaufmann repetto
via di Porta Tenaglia 7, Milan