COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES; GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS; EVA PRESENHUBER, ZURICH AND NEW YORK/© MICHAEL WILLIAMS
David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles now represents Michael Williams, who has been based in L.A. since 2015 but until now had no West Coast gallery to call home. Williams, who makes bright, surreal airbrush-on-inkjet paintings and last year had a solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, will continue to show at Gladstone Gallery in New York, as well as with Eva Presenhuber, which has outposts in Zurich and New York.
“I’ve been closely following and fascinated by Mike’s pictures for the last several years,” Kordansky said. “Each work is an existential conundrum, situated not only between abstraction and representation, oil paint and digital printing, but also skepticism and belief. You see and feel him thinking through each painting, dissecting it, taking it apart—by its basic tenets—and putting it back together again. This process is echoed in his often-allegorical images, vivisections of worldly as well as transcendent moments of contemporary life.”
Williams—who had work prominently included in MoMA’s contemporary painting show, “The Forever Now,” which was organized by Laura Hoptman in 2014—came out of the late-1990s Providence, Rhode Island community surrounding the collective space Fort Thunder, which included artists such as Jim Drain and the noise-rock outfit Lightning Bolt. After moving to St. Louis to study sculpture, he went on to New York at the start of the decade, where he became associated with Canada on the Lower East Side, having his first solo show there in 2007.
Canada showed Williams again in 2009, 2011, and 2013, during which time the artist also staged exhibitions at Veneklasen/Werner in Berlin and Michael Werner in London. Following his inclusion in the MoMA exhibition, Williams had a solo show at Gladstone Gallery’s townhouse space in Brussels, Belgium, and in 2017 put on view new work at Gladstone’s space on West 24th Street in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Kordansky will host Williams’s debut at his L.A. space in September 2018.