With London Fashion Week just around the corner, those looking to bring forward the celebration of all things style should head to emerging contemporary artist Ollie White’s upcoming solo show – opening at Shoreditch’s Haricot Gallery from Friday 05 to Saturday 27 September – which focuses on everyone’s favourite fashion accessory: the shoe.
The exhibition will feature works which explore the quiet, psychological space between object and meaning through the visual motif of shoes in boxes. Featuring 10 carefully curated works including The Party, The After Party, Soirée, and Mirage, the exhibition seeks to convey a layered investigation into themes of containment, memory, intimacy, and identity, all of which are explored through the seemingly simple and domestic motif of the shoe.
Through Ollie’s work, he encourages the viewer to see the boxed shoes as more than just artefacts, inspiring them to explore the ways in which an object can begin to act like a body, and how the shoes can act as characters, people, or gestures in a scene. Through the portrayal of shoes in a box, Ollie creates anthropomorphic tension, showing the box as not just a container for an inanimate object, but as a room or a frame for a living, breathing scene.
Ollie White is a British painter who has exhibited in London, Milan, and Shanghai, with his Red Shoes in Box having been selected for the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2024. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London, and graduated from the Master of Arts, Painting course in 2024, following time spent studying for his BA Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths, University of London. His first solo exhibition, Something Borrowed, will open at Haricot Gallery in Shoreditch from Friday 05 September.
