Michael Williams

Michael Williams surveys the recent evolution of the New York-based painter's practice, from large gestural oil paintings toward similarly scaled canvases printed with a billboard-sized inkjet printer.

Despite this shift in materials, Williams's paintings retain a warmth and personal quality, drawing on a dense catalogue of imagery built through drawing and a mining of the artist's inner psyche; the pictures are often comic, occasionally pointed about the present state of humankind, without settling into an accusatory tone. Refusing to side definitively with representation or abstraction, Williams instead pursues his own line of complex image-making. Published by JRP|Editions in 2015 as a hardcover of 64 pages with 45 color plates, the book was issued to accompany Williams's solo exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and includes essays by writer George Pendle and curator Dan Nadel.

Williams (born 1978) works between Los Angeles and New York; this monograph, edited by Lionel Bovier, captures a pivotal moment in his practice as he moved from painting by hand toward the hybrid drawing-to-print process that has since become central to his work. The Hudson Street Library separately holds Williams's 2017 Carnegie Museum of Art catalogue, from his first US solo museum exhibition.