Canadian artist Margaux Williamson's oil paintings depict domestic spaces including her home, studio and everyday outdoor scenes around her studio in Toronto. A dramatic use of light and distorted perspectives lend a surreal quality to the work; the scenes in her paintings appear like dreams where narrative is implied but unfixed. Primarily a painter, Williamson also works on books, films and creative projects with a community of collaborators.
Read MoreWilliamson was born in 1976 in Pittsburgh, USA and moved to Waterloo, Canada as a teen. In 1996, she enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario, and after spending a semester abroad studying film at the Glasgow School of Art, graduated with a BFA in 1999. In 2000, Williamson moved to Toronto, where she currently lives and works.
Williamson's paintings often focus on domestic spaces and objects. While she depicts tables, beds, bathtubs, bottles, scattered papers and quotidian outdoor spaces, she rarely paints people. Her style is characterised by rich, fluid strokes of oil paint and a dramatic luminosity that sways between romantic and apocalyptic. From smoky, shadowy scenes emerge brilliant highlights like candles, fire, lightbulbs and glowing screens.
Williamson often begins her paintings from written notes—thoughts or overheard conversations or phrases she can't get out of her head—which she refers to as 'text-sketches'. She keeps these text-sketches in a box, stating, 'sometimes it's a much quicker way of seeing if there's any natural order to your random imagination and line of thinking'.
According to Williamson, her paintings unfold from the notes and impose their own rules. She works slowly and layers multiple perspectives on a single canvas as she sees them, which makes time and spatial relationships seem to appear, accumulate and dissolve. In Bed (2021), for example, the artist depicts a bedroom with a bookshelf and an ornate rug, but the angles of the floor and walls don't appear to abide by the laws of physics. A switched-on lamp glows from the left side of the canvas, giving the sense that someone has just left the room.
Throughout her career, Williamson has collaborated with writers, artists, and musicians on various projects.
Since the early 2000s, she has had a longstanding collaboration with Canadian writer Sheila Heti. Heti's novel, How A Person Should Be (2010) is a fictionalised account of their friendship. The two women also collaborated on Williamson's feature-length film, Teenager Hamlet (2008), in which Williamson asked members of Toronto's West End creative community a series of existential questions. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 and is archived on UbuWeb.
In 2014, Williamson's book-as-exhibition I Could See Everything was published by Coach House Books. The series of paintings in the book took her six years to complete. Williamson first conceived of the project during a trip to the Yukon in 2009, hoping to 'see where the paintings would go when [she] gave them all the time in the world'.
Toying with fantasy and reality, I Could See Everything takes the form of an imaginary exhibition at a fictional venue called The Road at the Top of the World Museum. The book was published alongside exhibitions at Mulherin + Pollard in New York and Frith Street Gallery in London, both in 2014.
Williamson has been artist-in-residence at MacDowell in New Hampshire, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Klondike Institute in the Yukon.
In 2021, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection near Toronto hosted Williamson's retrospective, titled Interiors (6 November 2021–8 May 2022). The exhibition was accompanied by readings and performances by artists from other creative disciplines. The following year, White Cube presented an online exhibition of Williamson's work titled Introductions (19 March–11 May 2021).
Selected solo exhibitions include Margaux Williamson, White Cube, Hong Kong (2022–23); Margaux Williamson, Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2017); I Could See Everything, Mulherin + Pollard, New York (2014); The Girls Show Dostoyevsky the new darkness, Marvelli Gallery, New York (2007); Painting to Moby Dick, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto (2006).
Williamson's work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions and galleries including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada; Frith Street Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto.
Margaux Williamson's website can be found here.
Elliat Albrecht | Ocula | 2022
