Opening Reception:
Thursday June 5, 2025
6:00-8:00 PM
Skarstedt Paris is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Sue Williams, her fourth with the gallery and her second in our Paris space. Known for her fearless excavations of the sociopolitical through paint, Williams continues her decades-long practice of fusing acerbic critique with formal experimentation. In this latest body of work, she conjures a restless visual field in which twisted toes, melting horses, costumed frogs, and other disobedient forms hover, jostle, and careen across raw canvas—part protest, part dreamscape.
Emerging in the late 1980s with a politically charged, graphic approach to figuration, Williams has long challenged both the conventions of painting and the institutional forces behind them. Her canvases initially directly addressed sexual violence, gender inequality, and the failures of law. Over time these themes have remained, but her work has grown increasingly abstract without abandoning the corporeal, instead intertwining gestural mark-making with the persistent residue of the figure. In these new compositions, that duality remains striking: muscular brushwork meets airy line, suggestive silhouettes dissolve into pure color, and cheeky iconography mingles with painterly exuberance.
At once cartoonish and lyrical, these works revel in contradiction. The grotesque meets the buoyant; the vulgar sidles up to the charming. Bloated human figures, spindly feet, and salamanders coexist with frilly frogs, checkered prints, and floating cows. Sperm-like tadpoles swirl around the canvas, while toilets and sinks linger nearby. Amid the visual cacophony, abstraction and figuration refuse to hold their ground. Vivid splashes and delicate strokes compete for attention, producing compositions that defy visual hierarchy and resist tidy interpretation.
Yet for all their apparent chaos, these paintings are deeply controlled: orchestrated improvisations that channel formal invention through deliberate risk. Williams’ line remains unpredictable but precise—her touch as light as it is incisive. The eye is left to swim among body parts, blobs, and symbolic mischief, following no ordained path but always arriving somewhere surprising.
In Williams’ universe, abstraction is not a retreat from the world but a strategy for confronting it obliquely, even mischievously. Hers is a practice attuned to the grotesque comedy of power—whether personal or geopolitical—and committed to exposing its fault lines with wit, pleasure, and unrelenting clarity.
