SUE WILLIAMS

November 4 – December 4, 2004

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

For a growing number of viewers and artists, Sue Williams is the first painter in recent memory to plunge deep into the taboo-ridden areas of psyche and come back not merely to tell the tale, but to poke and prod viewers into cheering her along. In all the phases of her painting she has remained true to one principle: She dissolves forms in abstraction but at the same time she allows a corporeality to emerge through the gestural brush strokes against a monochrome background.

Embracing a type of realism influenced heavily by cartoons and comics, Williams starts in the early 90’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. The works present a tragic-comic combination of raw reality and unexpected humor.

During the late 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’ previous work, which was shown at the gallery Bernier/ Eliades in 2001, showed a turn towards formalism per se. In these works she considered the questions posed in the paintings of Abstract Expressionism and its heirs by working through her own abstraction. The allusions of her previous period have completely gone leaving just abstract energetic lines.

For the latest show however, she has made a series of paintings representing her familiar painted bodies get diffused into an informal, virtual abstraction. Distended and distorted the body is presented as a convoluted mix of inside and outside; a swelling blend of sexuality and violence, where boundaries and politics (gender/sexual) are no longer clear. But her figural abstraction is essentially playful, filled with traces of the black humor that graced her earlier work. We could question whether, by transforming her figures into abstract ciphers which are more decorative and less readable, they have lost their power. Part of the punch of Williams’ earlier works was her embrace of realism as a system for relating disturbing social facts. In her new work she appears mellowed, more mature, the bodies in these paintings are looking for liberation, a safe heaven, for a place to emerge from the mental and physical abuse of their earlier days.

The gallery remains open Tue – Fri, 10:30 – 20:00 and on Saturday, 12:00 – 16:00.