Jack White Brings “Hardware Store Art” to London in Debut Show at Newport Street Gallery
Jack White, the American musician best known as the guitarist and lead vocalist of The White Stripes, is stepping into public view as a visual artist for the first time. This spring, White will debut an exhibition of his artwork at Damien Hirst Newport Street Gallery in London, presenting a body of work that moves between sculpture, interactive pieces, installation, and furniture design.
Titled “These Thoughts May Disappear,” the show opens May 29 and runs through September 13. It marks a notable crossover moment: a musician with a long, largely private studio practice bringing his objects and constructions into a major contemporary art venue.
White, now based in Nashville, has repeatedly pointed to Detroit as the emotional and material engine of his visual work. The city’s industrial vernacular and the legacy of the Detroit Cass Corridor scene sit alongside his interest in mid-century modern furniture and the formal provocations of De Stijl and Dada. He has cited local Detroit Cass Corridor artists including Gordon Newton and Robert Sestok as touchstones.
He describes his approach as “Hardware Store Art,” a practice rooted in carpentry, upholstery, assemblage, and the repurposing of found materials. That description is not metaphorical. White has maintained an upholstery practice for years and, in 1996, opened Third Man Upholstery in Detroit, grounding his art-making in the practical knowledge of tools, surfaces, and construction.
At the center of the exhibition is a new version of White’s 2015 sculpture “The Red Tree.” The work begins with a dying tree that White transforms by coating it in oil-based fire engineered exterior paint. Over time, the piece continues to change: it slowly decays, its surface and structure shifting as the object takes on a new form.
Elsewhere in the show, White’s materials lean into the language of the workshop and the household. Works incorporate tools, weapons, and domestic equipment suspended in epoxy, turning utilitarian objects into sealed, glossy reliquaries. Other pieces use planks of wood painted in alternating stripes of black, goldenrod, cherry red, electric green, and cerulean, a palette that nods to graphic design and modernist color systems while retaining the blunt directness of painted lumber.
One work gathers what appear to be orange traffic markers into a cone-like formation, their bases fixed to a wooden pallet. The arrangement suggests a bonfire, translating a familiar street object into an image of heat and ritual.
White has framed his broader artistic ethic as a refusal of the obvious. “As an artist it is your job not to take the easy way out. I want to be turned on when I listen to an artist speak: I want them to show something that no one else is doing,” he said in a 2018 interview with The Guardian.
With “These Thoughts May Disappear,” Newport Street Gallery will offer the first sustained look at how that principle plays out beyond music: in objects built from the stuff of workbenches, city streets, and the long afterlife of materials that refuse to stay still.
