MICHAEL WILLIAMS

– Anders Sandberg, Senior Research Fellow at The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Fructis, its first exhibition with American painter Michael Williams. The show opens on September 7 and remains on view through October 20, 2018. An opening reception will take place on Friday, September 7 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.

Williams negotiates the long history of painting by consistently questioning—and often undoing—its major components. Challenging himself with an ever-evolving set of formal problems, he produces images that reflect modern complexity and contradiction. Included in this exhibition are a number of paintings composed on computer using Photoshop and a digital drawing pad before being inkjet-printed onto canvas. In the execution of his images Williams twists together a balance of offhanded gesture and careful compositional rigour, making decisions that keep his paintings wilfully mis-oriented.

Also in the exhibition is a group of Williams’s recent Puzzle Paintings. Here he methodically disrupts his compositions using a complex analog distortion process. Forms are reinterpreted through a jigsaw-puzzle-like scrim. Legible information is pushed towards disinformation, stylised beyond comprehension. In the process Williams draws out an organic, flowing variant on the modernist grid and institutes in his pictures something like productive destabilisation—a condition apparent throughout the works here.

Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pennsylvania) has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France (with Tobias Pils, 2017); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (2015); and Gallery Met, New York (2015). Current and recent group exhibitions include Joe Bradley, Oscar Tuazon, Michael Williams, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2018); The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Antelias, Lebanon (2017); High Anxiety, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016); Artists and Poets, secession, Vienna (2015); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); and Comic Future, Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2013). At the moment Williams lives and works in Los Angeles.