Booth C1
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new Puzzle Paintings by Michael Williams for Frieze Los Angeles. The fair will take place February 17 – 20, 2022, with VIP Previews from February 17 – 18. Michael Williams: Fructis, a new catalogue of the artist's 2018 exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery featuring a selection of his signature Puzzle Paintings, will be available for purchase on our website in early February.
Over the last two decades, Williams has utilized innumerable facets of painting's processes, history, and internal and external dialogues in the service of making works that honor its many competing traditions while remaining beholden to none of them. His ongoing series of Puzzle Paintings, a group of which are featured in this presentation, exemplifies the rigor and commitment—as well as the provocative combination of faith and doubt—that characterize his approach. In these newest examples, Williams explores the places where systematic procedure and intuitive expression converge and diverge, examining the intersections between modes of looking and making that are often considered antithetical to one another, and locating their unexpected harmonies as well as their generative dissonances.
In the Puzzle Paintings, Williams uses an analog system of processing his drawings to find a starting place for painting. Cutting into a representational drawing, he replaces amorphous sections with new forms and interventions that disrupt, complicate, and further resolve the original composition. This second drawing then becomes the source material for the painting, with the translation to pigment, medium, and canvas bringing about its own adjustments and distortions.
Here, however, for the first time, Williams has relied upon a single "first" representational drawing to make a group of paintings; while each painting is based on a unique "second" drawing, each of them is connected to a common source, laying a groundwork of seriality that in turn becomes one more structural condition to obey, manipulate, or openly rebel against depending on the needs and dictates of the evolving painting. Taking this gambit one step further, Williams has also worked with a more or less consistent palette throughout the series. Grey, black, and flesh tones dominate, with notable exceptions that introduce a piquant artificiality: chief among these is a piercing green that cuts through the comparatively natural thicket, supported in its boldness by oranges, pinks, and purples that help maintain an aura of crisp geometry.
Michael Williams has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at LOK, the Kunstzone in the Lokremise, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Switzerland (2021); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (with Tobias Pils, 2017); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Canada (2015); and Gallery Met, New York (2015). Recent group shows include .paint, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020); Joe Bradley, Oscar Tuazon, Michael Williams, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2018); The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon (2017); High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna (2015); and The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Canada. Williams lives and works in Los Angeles.