“7 years is like a published, edited diary for me, though I think it might not be for the viewer. Sporadically over a period of roughly seven years (beginning in 1995/6) I had been painting black squares into/onto a ruled A6 writing book. When I went to Amsterdam for the first time in 2000 I loved the massive windows of the houses along the canals. I can't describe them in words but found them not unrelated to the black squares I had been painting. So when visiting Jimmy in Amsterdam for 6 things I took a new book and tried to paint the windows of the houses along the canal as black squares, from life. It was something I wanted to do in the context of working on the whole project. We thought about including the action of me painting a black square in the performance but didn't.

“7 years is a selection of photocopied pages (the ones I liked) from my original book, stuck onto paper in a grid. The fact that the pages are organised chronologically from top to bottom, "reading" from left to right, with the first and last painting in the book at the beginning and the end is a system to be ignored and to which I have a belligerent yet fastidious attitude.” - Ian White, from an interview with Ken Pratt

White worked through his life with drawings and collages, but rarely exhibited them in their own right - 7 Years is one of the exceptions.

7 years was first presented as part of the Art Now installation White and Jimmy Robert presented at Tate Britain, as a part of their collectively-authored installation 6 things we couldn’t do, but can do now. White subsequently showed it separately under his own name as part of the exhibition Treehugger at Showroom Mama, Rotterdam in 2005. The collage was also shown as part of the posthumous exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in 2018.

The work has an obvious relationship to the series notebooks with blackened pages which White produced several years later, one of which features in the Powerpoint images of the performance Black Flags.

First exhibited: 20 November - 5 December 2004, Tate Britain, London

Subsequent exhibitions:

25 February - 27 March 2005, Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam