P·P·O·W is pleased to present Good mourning, Robin F. Williams’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a series of new large-scale paintings and gouaches on paper, this exhibition builds upon Williams’s previous examinations of the constructions of gender in portraiture, advertising, folklore, and social media. An avid cinephile, Williams found themself looking for ‘the paintings’ in horror films and psychological thrillers. These films cultivated a generative space for Williams, revealing transformative moments where both composition and narrative collide. In Good mourning, Williams blends their filmic references with art historical and cultural events to develop a type of fan fiction that creates space for alternative endings.

Obscuring the line between villain, victim, and savior, each of the female protagonists within Williams’s paintings resist the confines of their prescribed role. Morally complex, they present their dualities to the viewer as they learn to escape cycles of abuse. In Out the window, 2024, Williams invokes Carl Andre’s infamous words, “she went out the window”, in his 911 call following the murder of Ana Mendieta. Visually referencing the 1973 vampire film, Ganja and Hess, Williams pays homage to the role of the female character, Ganja Meda, as one who will go to any length to protect herself. Throughout the film, Ganja grapples with her sexuality, gender, and morality as it relates to race, class, and her bodily autonomy. In an act of self-preservation, she enters into an unholy union with a male vampire, leaving her further from her autonomy than before. In Williams’s version, the female figure is given the power to preserve her freedom by throwing that union out the window, creating a new horizon for her story.

Williams further complicates the notion of a ‘perfect victim’ in the exhibition’s eponymous work, Good Mourning, 2024. Inspired by the 1979 Gothic novel Flowers in the attic, later adapted into film, Williams examines the established conventions surrounding the widow archetype. Williams’s female figure gazes out defiantly, recalling Francisco Goya’s Mourning portrait of the duchess of Alba, 1797, as if challenging the viewer to call her a ‘bad widow.’ Evoking both Anjelica Huston’s 1985 Vanity Fair portrait by Annie Leibovitz, as well as the controversial wedding dress Anna Nicole Smith wore to her husband’s funeral, Williams constructs a layered portrait of a widow defying the false binaries between grief and joy, sex and death.

In a pair of large-scale paintings, Williams expands the theme of alternative endings from narrative concept to formal tool. Referencing the story of Édouard Manet’s The execution of emperor maximilian, 1867-69, which was cut into pieces and sold off separately by Manet’s son before being reassembled by Edgar Degas, Williams composed The cult, 2024, and Leaving the cult, 2024, such that they connect to form a continuous image but can also exist as independent paintings. When shown as a diptych, the female figure in Leaving the Cult teeters forever on the edge of escape. If the paintings are split up through the course of their lifecycle, the meaning of “leaving the cult” comes to fruition. However, the work suggests that ‘leaving’ remains an ongoing process and ‘mourning,’ as philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler writes, “has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know”1.

Alongside their oil paintings, Williams will also present a new series of gouaches on paper. Based on individual stills from When Harry met Sally, The Texas chainsaw massacre, Suspiria, Carrie, and more, these works depict women in critical moments of vulnerability, revelation, transformation, or catharsis. The process of making these gouaches allowed Williams to identify tropes within these films, such as women screaming, lying prone on the floor, and peaking around doors, which inspired their fan fiction approach to the large-scale works. As curator Sarah Berenz notes, “Like art history, Williams’s timeline is not linear, but progresses, borrows, blends, and folds back on itself to progress and reinvent again”2.

Good mourning will be accompanied by a zine offering visitors insight into Williams’s source imagery.

This exhibition also coincides with the release of Robin F. Williams: We’ve been expecting you, the first major monograph on the artist’s work. Published by the Columbus Museum of Art, this publication features new essays by Sarah Berenz and Lola Kramar, as well as an interview of the artist by Karen Rosenberg.

Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Morán Morán, Mexico City, Mexico; Perrotin, Tokyo; Pace Prints, New York, NY; and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Robin F. Williams: We’ve Been Expecting You, Williams’s first solo institutional exhibition, was on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, April 5 - August 18, 2024. Their work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally including Pictures girls make: portraitures, curated by Alison Gingeras, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; In New York, thinking of you (part I), Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; I’m not your mother, P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Fire figure fantasy, ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Present generations, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Oh; Xenia: crossroads in portrait painting, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; Nicolas Party: pastel, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; Seed, curated by Yvonne Force, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Collection Majudia, Montreal, Canada; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others.

Notes

1 Butler, Judith. Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence, Verso, 2004. pp. 21.
2 Berenz, Sarah. Robin F. Williams: We’ve been expecting you, Columbus Museum of Art, OH, 2024, pp. 4.