Inside Jack White’s Eccentric Show of ‘Hardware Store Art’
By Jo Lawson-Tancred
He composed one of most recognizable riffs of all time, but Jack White is never more animated than when describing some unlikely detail sneaked into his work that probably escaped your notice. Plenty of these charming eccentricities are scattered throughout the legendary American rocker’s latest big venture: not a new album, but a monumental art exhibition.
At first glance, White’s artworks are gaudy, Tim Burton-esque inventions, but they invite closer looking. Keen-eyed visitors will feast on color-coded references to his beloved back catalog or nods to his much-fabled start as a Detroit upholsterer across this impressive group of more than 100 sculptures, paintings, photographs, and pieces of furniture.
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Titled “These Thoughts May Disappear,” the exhibition features a mix of rare archival gems and new work. It remains on view at Damien Hirst‘s vast Newport Street Gallery in London through September 13.
Installation view of Jack White, The Red Tree (2026) in “These Thoughts Might Disappear” at Newport Street Gallery, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming, © the artists.
If art seems like a surprising pivot for White, now 50, the musician insists it’s been a long-time coming. “This has always been part of my universe,” he told me during a walkthrough of the show’s installation. “I’m just letting people come into my shop a little bit.” White is wary, however. “When people get to know you for music, they might not want you to do any other art form,” he said. “It can leave a bad taste in people’s mouth.”
Tall, laidback, and surprisingly humble, White was clearly excited to see his ideas finally taking shape. The exhibition has been several years in the making, having emerged from an off-hand suggestion by Hirst, who White met in 2021, after opening a London branch of his Third Man Records shop just opposite the artist’s Soho studio.
Even skeptics of White’s artistic pursuits could hardly accuse him of not maintaining a strong visual identity over the decades. He plays with these shifting guises, both real and imagined, in one series of statuettes modeled on “Ukulele Joe,” a 1940s chalk figurine he found in a junk shop in the ’90s. “This guy is my idol,” White explained. “I want to be him so I’ve kind of projected myself onto him.”
Jack White, Blue Ukulele Joe (Small) (2025). Photo: David James Swanson, © The Artist.
One statue, Garage Rocker Model, wears the iconic red, white, and black of White’s White Stripes era. Another dons the bright yellow associated with Third Man Records. And another sports a shock of blue hair, the same look that White debuted shortly after lockdown in an apparent bid to troll right-wing media. “‘Blue hair’ has now become an insult,” he noted, of its association with far-left socialists.
Through each of these eras, White has treated his workshop as a place of private refuge to which he returns religiously. No longer constrained by the need to make money as an upholsterer, he has poured himself into the obsessive crafting of wacky sculptures for his personal amusement and unique furniture pieces as gifts for friends.
Among the earliest examples, from 1996, is a swirled lollipop titled Hypnotize Children and a winsomely makeshift series of turtles constructed from painted pine wood. “Evolved” to survive a futuristic, urban landscape, they include the “defensive turtle,” with a head that can pop out from three holes, and the “sewer turtle,” which, like a hermit crab, has refashioned a shell from a Coke can and now dwells in a drainpipe. Both pieces are up for sale, having collected dust in an attic for long enough, said White.
Installation view of “These Thoughts Might Disappear” at Newport Street Gallery, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming, © the artists.
Exquisite pieces of furniture have been loaned for the show, including the Warrior Chair, a stylized, black-and-yellow striped armchair into which White has tucked wood chips scented with leather, glove oil, and burnt umbers that release an odor whenever a body compresses the seat. Such a bizarre innovation recalls the oft-cited anecdote that White stashed secret poems into sofas in his 20s. “I can’t help myself,” he joked about this love for concealing surprises.
Another piece calls to mind the Dutch modernist De Stijl movement, the clean-lined simplicity of which also inspired a White Stripes album of the same name. At the center of the room is an Eames chair upholstered by White using paint-splattered leather provided by Hirst.
It is a fitting homage to the once-rebellious YBA whose encouragement was the permission White needed to embark, five years ago, on an art-making rampage. He intentionally sought out methods that would be challenging to teach himself from scratch, including industrial spray painting, embroidering, welding, and tiling.
Jack White, God’s Smuggler (1996). Photo: David James Swanson, © The Artist.
“You only get that moment once,” he said. “The things you make the first time you’re trying a new tool are really interesting because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Over three decades White has developed a sculptural style he dubs “Hardware Store Art.” God’s Smuggler (1996), one of the most successful pieces on view, is an assemblage of black-lacquered tools and metal scraps from his father’s workshop that looks to me like a meeting between Louise Nevelson and Jean Tinguely.
The same spirit carries through to new work, most notably a series of decorated pallets that have been dreamt up as part of an absurdist scheme by the struggling Pallet Cleanse Corporation. The imagined company has decided to tailor its offering to specific needs, creating, for example, a model with red crosses and gurney-style wheels for an ambulance, an ultra-coveted, chromed metal “platinum model,” and even a tacky “presidential model” plastered in Rococo-style decor. For the latter, White ordered the “same crappy gold paint” from Home Depot as did Trump’s Oval Office.
Installation view of “These Thoughts Might Disappear” at Newport Street Gallery, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming, © the artists.
Asked what inspired the pallet series, White shrugged. “I just kept garbage-picking them,” he said, as though this is a perfectly natural thing for a celebrity to do. As for the use of found objects, he has long been inspired by Marcel Duchamp‘s eye for reimagining the everyday, and remembers feeling “knocked over” by seeing Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) for the first time as a teenager. All the Surrealists, including Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, are “killers with a smile on their face,” he added, and proof that humor needn’t cheapen artistry.
The worthy centerpiece to White’s exhibition debut is The Red Tree (2026), based on an original made in 2015, when he decided to paint a dying tree in his backyard bright red. It’s a startling, hyperreal creation that speaks to an outlandish imagination. In another life, White might have made movie sets.
As it is, Jack White’s world might be peculiar but, in his mind, maybe you’re the strange one. “People who don’t give a shit about color?” he said. “They astound me. Can you imagine just not caring?”
“Jack White: These Thoughts May Disappear” is on view at Newport Street Gallery, 1 Newport Street, London, through September 13.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.