SUE WILLIAMS: The 1990s

NOVEMBER 21, 2020 - JANUARY 30, 2021

SITUATIONS is pleased to present Sue Williams: The 1990s, an exhibition of the artist’s work from her early career. The exhibition will be on view from November 21 – January 31, 2021, dates coinciding with a show of her new paintings at 303 Gallery.

Central to the exhibition is Flesh House, a small, flesh-toned sculpture made of plastic with a light, which has the text, “We Ate / We Hid / We Procrastinated” scrawled in red on its exterior. Alongside this sculpture, a selection of paintings and drawings represent the artist’s interest in the abstraction of patriarchal society, interrogated through the lens of memory and personal experience. This sculpture shares common themes with her paintings, such as insecurity within the home and interrogation of gender roles, while foregrounding the artist’s fervent opposition to the continued existence of sexism as a social norm.

Since the mid-1980s, Williams has been recognized for her use of the visual lexicon of cartoons within her painting practice, subverting a playful aesthetic to address subjects of domestic violence and sexual obscenity. Early works on view, such as The Relatives in Yellow and Shopping in Beige, covertly pair seemingly banal titles with provocative imagery, calling attention to the violence which can underlie the most serene exteriors. Seen together, the way William’s weaves together the language of feminism and abstract expressionism becomes clear through fragmented bodies, floating high heeled shoes, animal heads with human breasts, or the view looking up a skirt.

Seeking discernible shapes alone misses the point. Maintaining a critical position, her early monochromatic paintings and sculptures are clues to her continued defiance of antifeminist systems. These works from the 1990’s provide an important glimpse into Williams’s development, not just as a painter, but as an artist who has mastered ideas through recurring motifs and distinctive mark-making spanning the decades.

SUE WILLIAMS was born 1954 in Chicago Heights, Illinois, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is represented in major museums and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; Sammlung Goetz, Munich. In the fall of 2015, her retrospective monograph was published by JRP|Ringier. Solo shows in public museums include Vienna Secession; IVAM Valencia, Spain; Geneva Center for Contemporary Art, and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Germany. She participated in 3 consecutive Whitney Biennials, and has been included in the recent group shows Comic Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art New York (2007); Rebelle, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (2009); Keeping it Real, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); Figuring Color, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); Take it or leave it, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art New York (2015); Painting 2.0, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015-16); and Everything Is Connected, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018).