Michael Williams

by Dan Nadel (Contributor), George Pendle (Text), Michael Williams (Illustrations)

In the last few years New York-based artist Michael Williams (born 1978) has evolved from making large gestural oil paintings to similarly scaled paintings printed with a billboard-sized inkjet printer. Despite the drastic shifting of materials there is a warmth and personal quality which persists in the paintings. Williams summons a large catalogue of imagery generated through a dedication to drawing and a mining of his inner psyche. The images that recur are often comical, and occasionally take jabs at the present state of humankind, though lacking an accusatory tone. There is a refusal in Williams' paintings to side with representation or abstraction, instead he neglects the issue and pursues his own line of complex image-making. This volume gives an overview of these recent shifts in Williams' paintings and includes essays by British fiction author and journalist George Pendle, and curator and writer Dan Nadel. It is published on the occasion of Michael Williams' solo exhibition at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

64 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2015

About the author

Dan Nadel is the owner of PictureBox, Inc. (http://www.pictureboxinc.com), a Grammy Award-winning publishing company.

Dan has authored books including Art Out of Time: Unknown Visionary Cartoonists, 1900-1969 and Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980. He has edited books including Gary Panter, We All Die Alone, and Where Demented Wented: The Art and Comics of Rory Hayes.
He has also co-edited Comics Comics and is currently the co-editor of The Comics Journal.

He has curated exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, L.A. and NYC, including the first major Jack Kirby retrospective, The House that Jack Built (Lucerne, 2010) and Karl Wirsum: Drawings 1967-1970 at Derek Eller Gallery.

He lives in Brooklyn with his beloved Rachel, their dog, Mr. Fatty Pants and their boy Henry.