DAVIDSON COLLEGE: DEPARTMENT OF ART
”Kent Williams: Native Bone and Far to Home comprises more than thirty drawings and paintings by acclaimed painter, Kent Williams (American, b. 1962). Williams’ work is characterized by strong gestural forms combined with areas of arresting detail, rendered with rich dynamic brushwork. Whether focusing on the lone human form or creating multi-figured, complex compositions, Williams’ friends, family members, favorite models, and the artist himself, all play a role in his often autobiographical or suggestive narratives.
Art critic Peter Frank notes a development in Williams, particularly evident in the more recent work in this exhibition: What seems to have begun as intimate portrayals in homey bedrooms or studio set-ups have become cyclones of image and effect, tossing seas of honed brushstrokes upon which personal effects bob and crash, even while the sitter at the eye of the storm regards his or her surroundings, and/or the painter and audience, with an unnerving sanguinity…They pose and ponder amidst their household cataclysms, as if in control of, or perhaps even the source for, the tornados threatening to engulf them.
Further, this exhibition, primarily focused on the last five years or so, depicts Williams’ recent obfuscation of the figure, as attributes of abstraction have become increasingly more important in his practice”.
.
FINE ART CONNOISSEUR - Bones with Flesh
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KENT WILLIAMS: HOW HUMAN OF YOU
101/EXHIBIT
October 25 – December 20, 2014
Press Release
.
HI FRUCTOSE
.
JUXTAPOZ
.
“For contemporary figurative painter Kent Williams, “the tactile qualities of the painted surface, the mark-making itself, plays as big a role in the resonance of a work” as its narrative aspects. And his bold compositions definitely convey some semblance of a story–albeit one that seems to come in from the side rather than straight on–conjuring the dream logic of reorganized time and requiring the viewer to “take part in the construction of the meaning.” Drawing is integral to Williams’s process, both as a means and as an end. “It’s through passion for drawing, or my struggle to interpret with honest effort, that my personal language is revealed,” he says.”
Santa Fean magazine, June/July 2014
.
BOUM! BANG!
.
“Arriving at an uncanny equipoise, his current paintings and drawings interweave the transitive states of dream and waking made in a heady mix of representational precision and breathlessly animated abstract gestures. Pure and simple, whether manifest as delicately jostled or fluently robust, Williams’ revered strain of para-objective mark-making stages some of the most seductive narrative and formal play generated by any artist at work today.”
Alex Ross, 2013
from the artist’s monograph, Kent Williams: Ophthalm
.
JUXTAPOZ, 2014
.
HI FRUCTOSE, 2013
.
JUXTAPOZ, 2013
.
THE CRITERION COLLECTION, 2013
.
D.A.P., fall 2012
.
KENT WILLIAMS: CONVERGENCE
MERRY KARNOWSKY GALLERY
May 21 – June 18, 2011
Press Release
.
“Joseph Campbell in “The Power of Myth,” writes that it is the function of the artist to act as interpreter of myth and humanity. It is a shamanistic role, aimed at transporting the viewer beyond the ordinary. Reconciling subjective realizations with uncertainty is one of the challenges of being human, and reflections on those challenges take center stage in the works of Kent Williams.”
Elenore Welles, ArtScene magazine, Jun 2010, “Kent Williams at Merry Karnowsky Gallery”
.
“Whether or not they actively subsume sexuality under the weight of calculated conceptual concerns, the formats of many media favored by contemporary artists tend towards disrupting acts of voyeurism. British artist Sarah Lucas’s jury-rigged assemblages investigate its seedy socio-economic complexities. A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s collaborative, performance-driven videos reformulate the paradigms of its mediation to emphasize its role in community formation. Defused by the enforced deadpan of their documentary sensibilities, it never rises to the glossy surfaces of Mona Kuhn’s at once bared and barren photographs.
By contrast, Kent Williams’ current paintings and drawings derive much of their potency from exemplifying figurative painting’s alluring tactility and coincidental ties to the long history of eroticized representation. Though tempered by comparison, the artist’s stylistic extravagance – manifest in expressionistically smeared, splattered, and abraded paint handling – calls to mind Cecily Brown’s fluent foregrounding of oil’s in-the-flesh immediacy and the cunning ease with which obfuscatory gestures can suggest sexual frisson.
Perhaps the show’s cynosure, “Blonde Natalia in Studio Arrangement” revels in the risqué, if also knowingly retardataire, associations of studio practice. Rendered in a flurry of writhing strokes of oil on linen, its physically idealized (i.e., sexually objectified) male and female models writhe in independent ecstasies against a backdrop of paint cans and orange extension cables – the latter an explicit reminder of the erotic currents snaking through the composition’s literal and figurative middle ground. Indulgent, irresponsible, and wickedly immediate, the painting – suitably representative of the majority of works on view – largely ignores the continuing crisis of representation. Williams’ willful indifference to such intellectual conceits serves to make it sexier.”
Alex Ross, Visual Art Source, Oct 2010, “Kent Williams at Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico”
.
“About 1962, his lush, unsettling selection, Kent Williams observes, ‘I know it’s not necessarily an uplifting looking image, but it is, I hope, a viscerally charged representation of the human need for vitality in life, which is not always gotten freely or without scars. The painting is one of my larger works, and shows fully my passion or love for pushing paint, and a good example of my inclination for suggested narrative and elliptical storytelling.’”
Shana Nys Dambrot, Juxtapoz magazine, Jun 2010, “Art from the New World at the Bristol City Museum”
.
“Investigating the amorphous construct between figuration and abstraction, the paintings of Kent WIlliams encompasses the last century’s new measures of pictorial makeup, while maintaining a formidable foothold in the classical representation of the human form. Not masking a rapport with physiognomically explorative artist such as Egon Schiele and Auguste Rodin, Williams also formulates into his glazed idiosyncratic amalgam a dose of mark-making in reverence to the likes of Willem DeKooning and Cy Trombly. A calligraphist of multifarious dynamism, the artist, often through multi-figured compositional complexity and suggestive narrative, or with the straight-forward lone human form, elicits the poignancy of thought, absurdity, and dreams that make up the human condition.”
Joseph Shantan, Art Held Projects, 2010
.
SWIM IN THE DEEP WATER: NEW WORK BY KENT WILLIAMS
MERRY KARNOWSKY GALLERY
September 27-October 25, 2008
Press Release
.
D.A.P., Catalog p. 135
Read Article , Fall 2008
.
“The main thing about Williams’ production, whatever form it takes, is that one feels a passionate desire to paint at work, and, in addition to that, a passionate desire to enlarge not only his own imaginative experience, but the imaginative experience of anyone who takes the trouble to give his paintings more than a glance. Painting, as I have already hinted, is recovering its consciousness of its own history, perhaps because the time has now come for it to break the shackles of Modernism and go on to something else. It is also embarking on a voyage into the unknown, where its functions will be very different from those assigned to it before the rise, first of the Modern Movement, then of all too numerous post-Modernist impulses, many of which are going to finish up in dead ends. My impression is that Williams sees a tempting highroad, much more clearly than the majority of his contemporaries, and wants us to come along for the trip.”
Edward Lucie-Smith, 2007
From the artist’s monograph, Kent Williams, Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992–2007
.
“Although clearly a student of Postmodernism, Williams’ narrative, portrait, still life, and landscape paintings have moved beyond Postmodern theory to examine contemporary humanism. In casting aspects of his private life onto the public stage in the form of timeless moral dilemmas, Williams has reinstated the importance of subjects, and taken back the role of originator and skilled narrator of our struggle to find meaning in life.”
Julia Morton, 2007
From the artist’s monograph, Kent Williams, Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992–2007
.
”...In his palette as well as his draftsmanship, Williams does not prioritize aesthetic naturalism but rather the evocation of emotional tones and symbolic psychological narratives. He imposes his style on his subjects; his work is more about how he sees the world than a reverence for how the world might actually appear. James Joyce has said that “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality,” and in Williams’s agile hands, portraiture becomes poetry.”
Shana Nys Dambrot, Artweek magazine, Oct 2006, “Kent Williams at Merry Karnowsky”
.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Merging Styles with Intensity
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times, August 25, 2006
.
”Kent Williams: Native Bone and Far to Home comprises more than thirty drawings and paintings by acclaimed painter, Kent Williams (American, b. 1962). Williams’ work is characterized by strong gestural forms combined with areas of arresting detail, rendered with rich dynamic brushwork. Whether focusing on the lone human form or creating multi-figured, complex compositions, Williams’ friends, family members, favorite models, and the artist himself, all play a role in his often autobiographical or suggestive narratives.
Art critic Peter Frank notes a development in Williams, particularly evident in the more recent work in this exhibition: What seems to have begun as intimate portrayals in homey bedrooms or studio set-ups have become cyclones of image and effect, tossing seas of honed brushstrokes upon which personal effects bob and crash, even while the sitter at the eye of the storm regards his or her surroundings, and/or the painter and audience, with an unnerving sanguinity…They pose and ponder amidst their household cataclysms, as if in control of, or perhaps even the source for, the tornados threatening to engulf them.
Further, this exhibition, primarily focused on the last five years or so, depicts Williams’ recent obfuscation of the figure, as attributes of abstraction have become increasingly more important in his practice”.
.
FINE ART CONNOISSEUR - Bones with Flesh
.
KENT WILLIAMS: HOW HUMAN OF YOU
101/EXHIBIT
October 25 – December 20, 2014
Press Release
.
HI FRUCTOSE
.
JUXTAPOZ
.
“For contemporary figurative painter Kent Williams, “the tactile qualities of the painted surface, the mark-making itself, plays as big a role in the resonance of a work” as its narrative aspects. And his bold compositions definitely convey some semblance of a story–albeit one that seems to come in from the side rather than straight on–conjuring the dream logic of reorganized time and requiring the viewer to “take part in the construction of the meaning.” Drawing is integral to Williams’s process, both as a means and as an end. “It’s through passion for drawing, or my struggle to interpret with honest effort, that my personal language is revealed,” he says.”
Santa Fean magazine, June/July 2014
.
BOUM! BANG!
.
“Arriving at an uncanny equipoise, his current paintings and drawings interweave the transitive states of dream and waking made in a heady mix of representational precision and breathlessly animated abstract gestures. Pure and simple, whether manifest as delicately jostled or fluently robust, Williams’ revered strain of para-objective mark-making stages some of the most seductive narrative and formal play generated by any artist at work today.”
Alex Ross, 2013
from the artist’s monograph, Kent Williams: Ophthalm
.
JUXTAPOZ, 2014
.
HI FRUCTOSE, 2013
.
JUXTAPOZ, 2013
.
THE CRITERION COLLECTION, 2013
.
D.A.P., fall 2012
.
KENT WILLIAMS: CONVERGENCE
MERRY KARNOWSKY GALLERY
May 21 – June 18, 2011
Press Release
.
“Joseph Campbell in “The Power of Myth,” writes that it is the function of the artist to act as interpreter of myth and humanity. It is a shamanistic role, aimed at transporting the viewer beyond the ordinary. Reconciling subjective realizations with uncertainty is one of the challenges of being human, and reflections on those challenges take center stage in the works of Kent Williams.”
Elenore Welles, ArtScene magazine, Jun 2010, “Kent Williams at Merry Karnowsky Gallery”
.
“Whether or not they actively subsume sexuality under the weight of calculated conceptual concerns, the formats of many media favored by contemporary artists tend towards disrupting acts of voyeurism. British artist Sarah Lucas’s jury-rigged assemblages investigate its seedy socio-economic complexities. A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s collaborative, performance-driven videos reformulate the paradigms of its mediation to emphasize its role in community formation. Defused by the enforced deadpan of their documentary sensibilities, it never rises to the glossy surfaces of Mona Kuhn’s at once bared and barren photographs.
By contrast, Kent Williams’ current paintings and drawings derive much of their potency from exemplifying figurative painting’s alluring tactility and coincidental ties to the long history of eroticized representation. Though tempered by comparison, the artist’s stylistic extravagance – manifest in expressionistically smeared, splattered, and abraded paint handling – calls to mind Cecily Brown’s fluent foregrounding of oil’s in-the-flesh immediacy and the cunning ease with which obfuscatory gestures can suggest sexual frisson.
Perhaps the show’s cynosure, “Blonde Natalia in Studio Arrangement” revels in the risqué, if also knowingly retardataire, associations of studio practice. Rendered in a flurry of writhing strokes of oil on linen, its physically idealized (i.e., sexually objectified) male and female models writhe in independent ecstasies against a backdrop of paint cans and orange extension cables – the latter an explicit reminder of the erotic currents snaking through the composition’s literal and figurative middle ground. Indulgent, irresponsible, and wickedly immediate, the painting – suitably representative of the majority of works on view – largely ignores the continuing crisis of representation. Williams’ willful indifference to such intellectual conceits serves to make it sexier.”
Alex Ross, Visual Art Source, Oct 2010, “Kent Williams at Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico”
.
“About 1962, his lush, unsettling selection, Kent Williams observes, ‘I know it’s not necessarily an uplifting looking image, but it is, I hope, a viscerally charged representation of the human need for vitality in life, which is not always gotten freely or without scars. The painting is one of my larger works, and shows fully my passion or love for pushing paint, and a good example of my inclination for suggested narrative and elliptical storytelling.’”
Shana Nys Dambrot, Juxtapoz magazine, Jun 2010, “Art from the New World at the Bristol City Museum”
.
“Investigating the amorphous construct between figuration and abstraction, the paintings of Kent WIlliams encompasses the last century’s new measures of pictorial makeup, while maintaining a formidable foothold in the classical representation of the human form. Not masking a rapport with physiognomically explorative artist such as Egon Schiele and Auguste Rodin, Williams also formulates into his glazed idiosyncratic amalgam a dose of mark-making in reverence to the likes of Willem DeKooning and Cy Trombly. A calligraphist of multifarious dynamism, the artist, often through multi-figured compositional complexity and suggestive narrative, or with the straight-forward lone human form, elicits the poignancy of thought, absurdity, and dreams that make up the human condition.”
Joseph Shantan, Art Held Projects, 2010
.
SWIM IN THE DEEP WATER: NEW WORK BY KENT WILLIAMS
MERRY KARNOWSKY GALLERY
September 27-October 25, 2008
Press Release
.
D.A.P., Catalog p. 135
Read Article , Fall 2008
.
“The main thing about Williams’ production, whatever form it takes, is that one feels a passionate desire to paint at work, and, in addition to that, a passionate desire to enlarge not only his own imaginative experience, but the imaginative experience of anyone who takes the trouble to give his paintings more than a glance. Painting, as I have already hinted, is recovering its consciousness of its own history, perhaps because the time has now come for it to break the shackles of Modernism and go on to something else. It is also embarking on a voyage into the unknown, where its functions will be very different from those assigned to it before the rise, first of the Modern Movement, then of all too numerous post-Modernist impulses, many of which are going to finish up in dead ends. My impression is that Williams sees a tempting highroad, much more clearly than the majority of his contemporaries, and wants us to come along for the trip.”
Edward Lucie-Smith, 2007
From the artist’s monograph, Kent Williams, Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992–2007
.
“Although clearly a student of Postmodernism, Williams’ narrative, portrait, still life, and landscape paintings have moved beyond Postmodern theory to examine contemporary humanism. In casting aspects of his private life onto the public stage in the form of timeless moral dilemmas, Williams has reinstated the importance of subjects, and taken back the role of originator and skilled narrator of our struggle to find meaning in life.”
Julia Morton, 2007
From the artist’s monograph, Kent Williams, Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992–2007
.
”...In his palette as well as his draftsmanship, Williams does not prioritize aesthetic naturalism but rather the evocation of emotional tones and symbolic psychological narratives. He imposes his style on his subjects; his work is more about how he sees the world than a reverence for how the world might actually appear. James Joyce has said that “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality,” and in Williams’s agile hands, portraiture becomes poetry.”
Shana Nys Dambrot, Artweek magazine, Oct 2006, “Kent Williams at Merry Karnowsky”
.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Merging Styles with Intensity
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times, August 25, 2006
.