303 Gallery is proud to present our twelfth exhibition of new paintings by Sue Williams.

For five decades, Sue Williams’ paintings have prodded at the underbelly of America’s political and social power structures with an acerbic wit and fervent brush. From the graphic, stylized aesthetic of her early feminist works, through her expressionist era and on to the sinuous, organ-filled abstractions made in the early aughts, Williams has continually reinvented her formal approach to painting while lampooning the more exploitative aspects of society. In her latest canvases, Williams borrows freely from her previous modes while introducing new strategies and concerns, synthesizing distinct aesthetics into a singular lexicon.

Turbulent, sweeping compositions cycle through subjects of varying tension and scale, pulling viewers in close to examine details that otherwise might be missed. Crisp, fragmented caricatures of horses, a flying squirrel, Hieronymus Bosch-ian hybrid femmes, and cartoonish buildings lurk amid vibrant splodges of color and winding gestures like a rippling pictorial subconscious. Bouncy, rotund forms fervently suggest intertwining bodies, limbs, and sex organs abstracted to the edge of legibility. Innocuous seeming doodles bump up against unsettling ones; in Williams’ world, we see it all.

Sumptuous paint handling reins in each chaotic web, with nods to Cy Twombly’s expressive hand and Joan Mitchell’s charged palette. Darkly perceptive, Williams continues to wrestle difficult truths and with sardonic brilliance and painterly vision.

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; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. 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). In 2009, Williams received the Painters and Sculptors Grant from Joan Mitchell Foundation and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.