ART-PREVIEW:Michael Williams
Over the last 10 years, Michael Williams has created paintings known for their layered imagery, eye-popping color, and use of techniques such as airbrushing and inkjet printing. His large-scale works often begin as drawings either on paper or on the computer screen before they are printed or transferred to canvas and then embellished with oil paint.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive
Michael Williams in his new solo exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York, continues in the vein of recent digitally printed works but on a grander scale. Williams has an eclectic and energetic style that mixes airbrushed paint with inkjet prints (he’s been eliminating brushwork from his paintings since 2013). While his subjects and techniques are constantly shifting, his paintings usually result in a beautiful yet anxious hodgepodge of surrealistic patterns and imagery. While Williams enjoys the directness that comes from working digitally, he is also invested in the process of printing’s implied challenge to the doctrine of painting. By designing the content of his paintings in the digital environment, Williams both rejects the expressionistic dictum that painting is a direct extension of the body and reinvents it for the 21st Century through the terms of computerized experience. In an interview he says about his influences: “I’ve been thinking about people like Joe Zucker, Malcolm Morley, Polke, and Albert Oehlen. I’ve also been looking at William S. Burroughs’ paintings and collages recently, and a German painter from the 60’s named Uwe Lausen. But most of the art I see is in books or on the Internet. In photographs of paintings, you only get the image, you don’t get the surface. And I’ve begun to like it this way. I’m left to finish the story. I can imagine the surfaces of these paintings how I would like them to be [they’re] my dream version”. Blending drawn lines, stretched agglomerations of form, and translucent scrims of paint along the printed surface, Williams’ paintings situate us on an unlikely border between the familiar and the indecipherable. Williams’ work is simultaneously pluralistic and conceptual, extending and interrupting modernist formalism while assimilating the ironies and contradictions of daily life. Michael Williams was born in 1978 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. After studying sculpture at Washington University, Saint Louis (2000), he turned to painting. His practice attracted attention in 2003, when he took part in a first group exhibition entitled “Barkley’s Barnyard Critters” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Since then, his output has continued to fascinate everyone interested in the renewal of painting. He was invited to participate in the collective exhibition “Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Info: Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 31/3-6/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com