Michael Williams

In the last few years Michael Williams (born 1978 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) 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 that persists in the presence of the printed paintings. Williams summons a large catalogue of imagery generated through a dedication to drawing and a mining of his inner psyche. The images that appear again and again in the paintings are often comical, and occasionally make jabs at the present state of mankind, although not in accusatory tone. There is a refusal in Williams' paintings to side with representation or abstraction; rather he neglects the issue and pursues his own path of complex image making.