Sue Williams: WHAT NOW

The most comprehensive exhibition to date on American artist Sue Williams (*1954 in Chicago Heights, Illinois) offers a new perspective on her compelling oeuvre: Williams has been exploring power and oppression, gender relations, and body politics through the medium of painting since the late 1980s. Long regarded as a paradigmatically patriarchal domain, she brilliantly navigates this field using a variety of painterly strategies.

Williams’s early works, which showed scenes of everyday sexualized violence with unflinching anger, brought her fame almost overnight in the early 1990s. Subsequently body fragments took on a life of their own as allover ornamental compositions or powerful lines of intensive vibrancy. Later groups of works increasingly reacted to political developments in the United States and beyond; these painterly explosions of color and form reflect war rhetoric, media overload, and social dystopias. In recent pieces Williams combines elements from earlier phases to create complex, highly detailed pictorial arrangements that oscillate between figuration and abstraction and tell of structural violence and individual trauma, memory and resilience. 

The exhibition WHAT NOW presents over one hundred key works from the past five decades. Williams’s paintings derive their distinctive force from the way they combine the humorous with the harrowingly explicit, expressed through a painterly gesture that reveals both the consistency and the evolving complexity of her uncompromising feminist oeuvre. The succinct and stirring title conveys the urgency of confronting the realities of the present.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication Sue Williams: WHAT NOW, with contributions by Bice Curiger, Katarina Lozo, Katrin Plavčak, Stella Rollig, Barry Schwabsky, Nancy Spero, Sue Williams, and Luisa Ziaja, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne.

Curated by Luisa Ziaja. Assistant Curator: Katarina Lozo. Press contact: presse [at] belvedere.at / T +43 1 79 557 185. View press materials here.