SUE WILLIAMS

May 24- July 5, 2001

Sue Williams was born in 1954 in Chicago Heights, Illinois. She lives and works in New York.

Embracing a type of realism influenced heavily by cartoons and comics, Williams starts in the mid 80’s making paintings featuring scrawled drawings of bodies that referenced different forms of violence committed against women: rape, battery and emotional abuse. A major theme of Sue Williams’ art was the interplay between the social and the sexual, particularly how the social inequities between men and women are played out in their sexual relations. Her colours were limited to white, black and yellow and the works present a tragic-comic combination of raw reality and unexpected humour.

In the beginning of the 90’s Sue Williams begins to emphasize the more aesthetic and pictorial aspects of her work: her paintings become increasingly abstract, more decorative, almost calligraphic in their looping, swirling lines. However, a closer look, reveals figures, mutilated parts and genitalia all mingled together, filling the entire canvas suggesting a horror vacui. Pain, anger and sexual abuse are all hidden in the canvas in a seemingly abstract composition. Williams continues to explore sexuality and social taboos but in a more openly expressive style that borders on the abstract.

Sue Williams’ last work, which is shown in the gallery Bernier/ Eliades, shows a turn towards formalism per se. She now considers the questions posed in the paintings of Abstract Expressionism and its heirs by working through her own abstraction. Her canvases have become increasingly large and reductive; bright primary colours and Day-Glo have replaced the white and black of her earlier works. The allusions of her previous period are completely gone leaving just abstract energetic lines.