In the last few years New York-based artist Michael Williams (born 1978) has evolved from making large gestural oil paintings to similarly scaled paintings printed with a billboard-sized inkjet printer. Despite the drastic shifting of materials there is a warmth and personal quality which persists in the paintings. Williams summons a large catalogue of imagery generated through a dedication to drawing and a mining of his inner psyche. The images that recur are often comical, and occasionally take jabs at the present state of humankind, though lacking an accusatory tone. There is a refusal in Williams' paintings to side with representation or abstraction, instead he neglects the issue and pursues his own line of complex image-making. This volume gives an overview of these recent shifts in Williams' paintings and includes essays by British fiction author and journalist George Pendle, and curator and writer Dan Nadel. It is published on the occasion of Michael Williams' solo exhibition at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
