Michael Williams is an American painter whose humorous tableaus present convoluted visual problems to re-examine the canon of art history and pop culture. Blending inkjet prints, oil paint, and airbrush, he combines digital and analogue processes to create 'puzzles' for the viewer to interpret.
Read MoreWilliams was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. He began painting when he was nine years old, encouraged by his mother, who painted as a hobby. Williams completed Summer Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996, before completing his BFA in Sculpture at Washington University, St. Louis in 2000.
Although resolutely believing he would become an artist, at university Williams briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an investigative journalist—an approach that is present in his creative practice as he visually interrogates his subject matter. When returning home to Providence, he was exposed to the art scene at Fort Thunder, a 1990s warehouse space that was both a venue and a living-working studio space for artists.
Williams later worked in the studios of Matthew Barney and Vito Acconci in New York, both of whom he credits for his tireless work ethic. His first solo exhibition was held at Canada Gallery, New York in 2007, where he emerged as the youngest of a core group of painters—including Joe Bradley, Brian Belott, and Katherine Bernhardt—whose works are tied by a playful and subversive humour.
Juxtaposing elements of Surrealism and Abstraction with figurative forms, Michael Williams' practice presents an optical conundrum to the viewer by toying with perception. His psychedelically coloured paintings are a result of digital and painterly collage, built upon a combination of exacting processes and off-hand gestural strokes that encode meanings, often to contradict each other.
Williams' early work fell into a variety of categories that have since blossomed into further projects and mediums. He initially worked in a Surrealist representational style, predominantly in oil and airbrush on canvas, before beginning to incorporate digital inkjet print in 2011. Describing his own love for 'decoding things' as he paints, Williams' Surf n' Turf (2) (2009) depicts a lobster and a clam at a computer desk, amoeba-like patterns in rainbows of colour exploding out from the monitor. The viewer is forced to decode the visual swirls as the sea creatures presumably code them for us.
Williams' 'puzzle drawings' begin as doodles and sketches, which he then manipulates in Photoshop to remove a section in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece, continuing to draw in the space left behind. His solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh in 2017 featured one room of paintings and the other devoted to 40 drawings that were made in preparation to create the final product. Untitled Gourd (2016) displays an amalgamation of a computer keyboard, floor tiles, a galactic sky and his puzzle-piece-painted shapes to create a scene where the eye finds it difficult to land.
Williams 2020 exhibition Opening at Gladstone Gallery, New York featured works that moved away from his complicated visual style to focus on recognisable, unembellished imagery. The 11 monumentally sized canvases and five smaller collages were entirely produced through digital processes—combining collaged images lifted from commercial advertising and the artist's own virtual strokes—removing any evidence of his complex layering process. Painting (2020) depicts a figure standing in front of one of Williams' own paintings, exemplifying the self-referential and humorous thread that ties his works together.
Williams was awarded an artist residency at The Moore Space, Miami in 2007. He also won a residency from the Danish Arts Council in 2009.
Michael Williams has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Michael Williams, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); MAKE PLANS GOD APPLAUDS, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2021); Opening, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2020); New Paintings, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2019); Fructis, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2018).
Group exhibitions include Drawing 2020, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2020); Input / Output: Painting after Technology, Galerie Max Hetzler, London (2019); Fatherhood, Over The Influence, Los Angeles (2019); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York (2019); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014).
Annie Curtis | Ocula | 2022
