Anthony Torrano
Concrete Spirit

White Columns is pleased to present the debut exhibition by Anthony Torrano (b. 1992, San Francisco.) Torrano makes paintings that use frottage and other printmaking techniques as a method of embedding objects, sites and surfaces onto canvas. Though often referencing both personal and social narratives, the artist’s tendency towards abstraction fragments a linear reading of these histories.

As a title, Concrete Spirit distills the complex interplay between interiors and exteriors that marks much of Torrano’s work. In Notes on Awkwardness (2025), rubbings of a 19th-century manhole cover are surrounded by plaster casts produced from the artist’s family’s wooden mooncake mold. Collapsed into the same dimension, i.e. that of the canvas, the contrasting public and private source images are thus reconciled. The abiding transformational force here is pressure: whether as in the pressure applied to take a rubbing of a city street or that by which people themselves are formed by their cultural environs. For Torrano, the application and subsequent removal of paint from the canvas’ surface serves similarly as an analog for the leveling effects of cultural assimilation, an interplay of accretion and abrasion that creates something new.

Throughout Torrano’s work the negotiation of images variously expresses the slipperiness of memory and experience. In smaller works like Translator (2026), propagandistic illustrations of Chinese-American schoolchildren taken from a 1960s school notebook are desaturated of their cheery hues and surrounded, relic-like, by silver leaf, which recurs in the nearby Loot (2026.) Torrano’s enduring fascination with the translation of surfaces reveals his early formal training as a printmaker. In his persistent use of frottage, Torrano’s paintings have the indexical quality of direct impression and that of marks made at distinct points in time and space. These indexical marks are constantly negotiated by the corresponding presence of the artist’s hand, as in the painting Concrete Spirit (2026), in which a rubbing of a commemorative street plaque in San Francisco’s Chinatown is bound at the bottom edge by a great rusty wash of color.

Expressed in layers and fragments, Torrano’s work is a rumination on the relationship between geography, history and memory and an argument for the potential of the painted space as a means of place-keeping and place-making.

Anthony Torrano (b. San Francisco, 1992) is an artist based in New York City. He is a recent graduate of the Hunter College MFA program (2025) and received his BA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus in painting and printmaking. Anthony was a recipient of the 2015 Susan Benton Irwin Scholarship at UCSC, a 2021 Artists Corps Grant recipient from the New York Foundation of the Arts, and a 2022 Frederieke Sanders Taylor Studio Fund Grant. He has exhibited in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in New York at SWIM Gallery, ProArts, Incline Gallery, Adobe Books, Room284 and Shelter Gallery.

A new publication by Torrano, produced on the occasion of the exhibition, will be released under White Columns’ zine imprint “The W.C.”

For further information about this exhibition contact: violet@whitecolumns.org

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Art (by) Dealers
organized by Kathy Huang and Will Leung

Mitchell Algus, Viola Angiolini, Olivier Babin, Nicelle Beauchene, Maria Bernheim, Stefania Bortolami, Gavin Brown, Marie Catalano, Jaqueline Cedar, Adam Cohen, Anthony Cran, William Croghan, Jeffrey Deitch, Robert Dimin, Bridget Donahue, Brian Faucette, Eric Firestone, Leo Fitzpatrick, Ryan Fontaine, Jessica Fredericks, Andy Freiser, Aron Gent, Sam Gordon, Jesse Aran Greenberg, Colleen Grennan, Sarah Han, Will Hathaway, Joseph Ian Henrikson, Matthew Higgs, Kathy Huang, Rob Hult, Michael Jenkins, Nina Johnson, Pali Kashi, Ingrid Bromberg Kennedy, Anton Kern, Anatoly Kirichenko, Jackie Klempay, Margaret Lee, Francesca Leszynski, Will Leung, Perry Levine, Jacob Lewis, Silke Lindner, Lucy Liu, Sibilla Maiarelli, Lauren Marinaro, Lilly McClure, Monique Meloche, Micki Meng, Mario Miron, Charles Moffett, Jen Mora, Davida Nemeroff, Wendi Norris, Scott Ogden, Wendy Olsoff, Paola Oxoa, Lucas Page, David Pagliarulo, Kat Parker, Sam Parker, John Riepenhoff, Ellie Rines, Bennett Roberts, Hannah Root, Nicole Russo, Sara Maria Salamone, Margot Samel, Violet Saxon, Kerry Schuss, Louis Shannon, Samantha Sheiness, Michael Sims, Erin Somerville, Pascal Spengemann, Daniel Sperry, Emily Sundblad, Mike Tan, Benjamin Tischer, Rachel Uffner, Annette Wehrhahn, Wallace Whitney, Graham Wilson, Sam Wilson, Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, Yve Yang, Shihui Zhou, Alivia Zivich, Anna Zorina

White Columns is pleased to present Art (by) Dealers, a group exhibition organized by Kathy Huang and Will Leung. Conceived by Huang and Leung and originally held at Long Story Short, New York in the summer of 2023, the exhibition has been reprised for its second iteration at White Columns, and includes newly commissioned works by more than eighty artist-dealers.

Art (by) Dealers platforms works made by gallerists, art dealers, and gallery employees – some of whom are also practicing artists. Tasked with creating an original artwork, the only parameters given to the participants were the dimensions: 12” x 9”. Inverting the tradition of the sprawling group show/charity auction, Art (by) Dealers instead playfully upends the usual dichotomy between artist and dealer.

Here, newly created artworks by multi-hyphenate MFA graduates, hobbyists, novices, and everyone in between are gathered to generously support White Columns’ mission. All works are priced at $500 and offered for sale anonymously. All proceeds will support White Columns’ future programs with both emerging and underrepresented artists.

CONDITIONS OF SALE

No preview

No advance sales

First come, first served

One purchase at a time

No holds

No discounts

No returns/exchanges

NYC sales tax (8.875%) will be applied to all purchases

Buyer pays shipping

Kathy Huang is an independent curator and a Director at Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles. Will Leung is the founder of Long Story Short, New York and Paris.

PS. In 2007 White Columns organized Early Work, an exhibition initiated by Marilyn Minter and Fabienne Stephan, that featured works by a cross-generational group of artists and practitioners who would subsequently eschew art making to establish instead highly influential commercial art galleries: Gavin Brown, Jeffrey Deitch, Janice Guy, Pat Hearn, Konrad Lueg (Fischer), and Maureen Paley.

For further information about this exhibition contact: violet@whitecolumns.org

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

White Columns
91 Horatio Street
New York, NY 10014
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
info@whitecolumns.org
Instagram