FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Regen Projects
633 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
T: 310 276 5424
F: 310 276 7430
Sue Williams: New Paintings
March 15 – April 12, 2003
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10:30 am - 5:30 pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 15, 6-8 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Sue Williams. Williams’ work gained attention in the late 80's when her paintings echoed and argued with Post-Feminist dialogues. Williams’ early paintings used text and the figure to reflect on explicit themes, however in her new work, the focus has shifted toward the idea of formalism in painting. Williams has become less concerned with specific illustration and more interested in merging figurative representation and abstraction, combining and slipping between the two while avoiding the limitations of these genres. The figures of the earlier comic-strip like works have been reduced to lines, and it is now the expressive brushed and poured lines that become the subject occupying an empty background. The new paintings are dominated by thick forceful lines, occasionally articulated by allusions to anatomy. The idea of skilled painting is given an almost ironical treatment with nods to the Abstract Expressionists, but at the same time there is a lush painterly quality.
“The visual impact of [Williams’] work is dependent to some degree on the viewer’s ease in negotiating the two-step process by which most of the paintings reveal themselves. For most, the initial vantage-point is from a middle distance, whereupon the paintings appear mostly as lyrical abstractions, their elegant linear passages seeming to describe nothing more than graceful arabesques in space. This formalist perspective soon gives way to a more detailed examination of the lines themselves, at which point the explicit details of exaggerated body parts are more clearly exposed. Even within these limited parameters, Williams’ gift for painterly improvisation is remarkable.”
(Dan Cameron. Sue Williams. published by Secession, Austria and IVAM, Spain. 2003. p. 40)
Last year, solo exhibitions of Williams’ paintings were organized by the Vienna Secession in Austria, and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Florida. Two monographs were published last year: Sue Williams: Art for the Institution and the Home, published by Secession in Vienna, Austria, and IVAM in Valencia, Spain; and Sue Williams: A Fine Line, published by the Palm Beach ICA in Florida.
An opening reception for Sue Williams will be held at the gallery on Saturday, March 15 from 6-8 pm. For further information, please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin at the gallery at 310 276 5424.