Sue Williams

Sue Williams, Chicago Heights, Illinois, 1954, studied at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), graduating in Fine Arts in 1976. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her recent works investigate the line between abstraction and representation by showing body parts so distorted that they metamorphose into abstract compositions. Using the human body as a tool to discuss complex issues of gender roles and relations, she explores the subject of the body as art along with artists such as Matthew Barney and Kiki Smith. Williams begins with the figure and then proceeds to twist, bend and contort the body until it resembles an exaggerated caricature. The resulting image is so warped that one cannot determine which part of the figure one is looking at. Williams’s work from the early 1990s addressed issues of domestic violence, misogyny and sexual abuse. Her paintings of those years have a comic book style that features cartoon-like figures in painful situations accompanied by intense and witty text. The paintings are cast in black and white and crudely organised in relation to the narrative. These caustic comments on the state of gender relations resemble stream of consciousness doodles from a sketchbook or journal. In the mid-nineties Sue Williams began to use less and less text in her work, while her brushstrokes and lines became more gestural and colourful, filling up the canvas. This style of lively abstraction has been compared to the work of De Kooning, Pollock and Mitchell. The exhibition that we are preparing is a co-production with the Austrian institution Secession in Vienna, where it will be presented from 21 November 2002 to 26 January 2003; at the IVAM, it will be open to the public from 15 May to 6 July 2003. This exhibition, the first presentation of Sue Williams’s work in European institutions, is curated by Matthias Herrmann, President of Secession, and Teresa Millet, Curator at the IVAM. About sixty works dating from 1990 to 2002 will be shown, including large-format paintings and works on paper.