Edited by Lionel Bovier. Text by Johanna Burton, Ruth Erickson.
The first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the American artist Sue Williams (born 1954), this book follows her work from the early 1980s to her most recent paintings. Over the course of her 40-year career, Williams has made an array of artwork, from modest paintings of mostly representational scenes in a cartoonish style to large-scale abstract paintings erupting in brilliant colors. In her newest works, figuration and abstraction are mixed anew, for although the images are abstract, the beholder comes across recognizable details--individual body parts or formations reminiscent of human organs. Williams has continuously explored and challenged the fantasies of feminism, sexuality, gender and culture in her work. Throughout her practice she has explored the ambiguous boundary between a secure place and an insecure one, between the real and the imagined, drawing the viewer into her world of provocative sexual politics.
"Your Bland Existence" (1992) is reproduced from Sue Williams.
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"What does it mean to represent fear, and to account for the toxicity that accompanies unnaturally long-term experiences of it," Johanna Burton asks in JRP|Ringier's excellent new retrospective monograph. "Could it be that Williams' abstract-ish paintings… are able to put forward a kind of proof? Viewers encountering a canvas by Williams today—let's take "It's a Man's World" (2014)—will find a cacophony of color and line, bright slashes of near-neon pigment cutting briskly across a shallow background. There are some undeniable things here, but none of them stable: a grid that could be a keyboard or a toppling building; a towering figure that looks at once like a phoenix and a bulldozer. What is undeniable is the destructive force pictured, with everything in the process of being uprooted, lines of motion nearly Futurist in their depiction. If this is proof of the atmosphere all around us, it is, however, a kind of antidote, too, a suspension of the very forces that we deeply, and consistently, fear but do not see. It is a promise, maybe, that in making things visible, in figuring them this way, despite their unwieldy omnipresence, we stand a chance of producing counter-scenes too. And that is why, for all their terror, Williams' works—from the beginning, and now still—are impossibly pleasurable. They are proof that we are not only subjected to the world we live in, but subjects within it, too." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 10.75 in. / 144 pgs / 100 color / 50 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $80.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $107.5 ISBN: 9783037643747 PUBLISHER: JRP|Ringier AVAILABLE: 1/26/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Lionel Bovier. Text by Johanna Burton, Ruth Erickson.
The first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the American artist Sue Williams (born 1954), this book follows her work from the early 1980s to her most recent paintings. Over the course of her 40-year career, Williams has made an array of artwork, from modest paintings of mostly representational scenes in a cartoonish style to large-scale abstract paintings erupting in brilliant colors. In her newest works, figuration and abstraction are mixed anew, for although the images are abstract, the beholder comes across recognizable details--individual body parts or formations reminiscent of human organs.
Williams has continuously explored and challenged the fantasies of feminism, sexuality, gender and culture in her work. Throughout her practice she has explored the ambiguous boundary between a secure place and an insecure one, between the real and the imagined, drawing the viewer into her world of provocative sexual politics.
