Michael Williams

S 5th to S 4th, 2010

Great Jones Alley

Michael Williams was born in 1978 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and is currently based in Los Angeles. He earned a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri in 2000.

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.

 Williams is drawn to the sort of painterly impasse presented by the material and connotational conflicts of oil painting vs. computer printing. 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. The familiarity of his vocabulary in these paintings—houses, computers, spaceship interiors, the “COEXIST” symbol, and tubes of paint—is filtered through the artist’s wry sense of humor, ultimately achieving a reasoned entropy.

Solo exhibitions at

• The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

 Other exhibitions include

• Secession, Vienna

• Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas

• Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio

• Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas

• Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow