Jack White Brings Sculpture to Damien Hirst’s London Gallery
Jack White is entering the gallery world with a new exhibition in London, where his work will be shown at Newport Street Gallery, the space run by Damien Hirst. “Jack White: THESE THOUGHTS MAY DISAPPEAR” opens May 29 and remains on view through September 13, presenting a side of the musician that has largely stayed out of public view.
The exhibition includes sculptures, furniture designs, notebooks, and photography. White’s practice draws on found objects and on his earlier work as an upholsterer, giving the pieces a material intelligence that feels assembled rather than merely displayed. The emphasis is not on polish, but on transformation: ordinary things reworked into objects that carry tension, wit, and a slightly unsettled charge.
White and Hirst first met in 2021, when White was preparing a new Third Man Records outpost in Soho, directly across from Hirst’s studio. White played a balcony performance for the opening, drawing a crowd that stopped the neighborhood in its tracks. Later, when he showed Hirst images of the work he had been making privately, Hirst encouraged him to mount an exhibition.
White has long signaled an interest in art. The White Stripes’ second album, De Stijl, took its title from the Dutch art-and-design movement, and the band’s red-and-white visual identity became one of the most recognizable looks in rock. Still, White has said he wanted this project to be taken seriously as visual art, not treated as a celebrity diversion.
That distinction matters. In a culture where musicians often test the boundaries of the gallery system, White’s exhibition arrives with an unusually deliberate framing: not as a novelty, but as a sustained body of work shaped by objects, memory, and design. At Newport Street Gallery, the question is less whether White can cross over than how far his visual language can go on its own.
