Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to announce an online viewing room of new paintings and drawings by the American artist Michael Williams. Our online presentation previews Williams' exhibition, Frogs 1 – 9, opening tomorrow at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna.
In past bodies of work, Williams has developed a suite of interconnected paintings out of a drawing, not uncommonly focused on a human figure or surrogate. In the case of Frogs 1 – 9, the source is Untitled (Frog) (2019–2020): a small sheet given over to a greying man-cum-jester, hollowed nostrils shaped like an electrical outlet and mouth agape, forming an unlikely heart.
As is customary for his method, Williams has taken the primary composition and, through lacerating it, turns it into a segmented field, which he then repopulates with broad swathes of color. Beginning in 2010, he started photocopying drawings and contouring puzzle pieces across them before cutting out those sections to further warp as well as newly constitute the picture. A single-authored version of an exquisite corpse, each of these pieces is full of seeming non-sequiturs, contiguous but willfully non-integrated information, that still baits us with the possibility of resolution.

OPENING on Thursday, June 2, 6 – 9 pm

mpefm AUSTRIA art press release