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Robert Williams
New Paintings December 13, 1997 - January 31, 1998 Press Release Back to Exhibition List |
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Robert Williams
New Paintings
December 13, 1997 - January 31, 1998
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Williams. This inaugural exhibition will include 18 paintings as well as a number of works on paper.
Robert Williams has long been a controversial and celebrated master of the populist American vernacular in fine art. Often imitated but rarely equaled, he remains an enduring and visionary original. In a career that has spanned not only decades, but more significantly generations, Williams has made an indelible mark on popular culture and inspired legions of artists long before his relatively recent and much belated rise to prominence in the art world. By the time Williams' art finally received its critical acceptance and institutional acknowledgement in the Nineties (through such seminal museum exhibitions as Helter Skelter and Kustom Culture as well as innumerable reproductions and essays in magazines and books) he was already a living legend revered by many prominent film-makers, musicians, writers and artists of our age. In this way, the official neglect of his work has been as much a part of his myth as his international fame among kids, or his cult-like following along the cutting edge of contemporary artists, who have been deeply influenced by his distinctive graphic style, keen social eye, radical visual distortion, scandalously irreverent humor and unabidingly iconoclastic deconstruction of consensus reality.
Responsible for some of the most visually arresting, memorable and widely disseminated images to emerge out of the underground, Robert Williams provided the pictures by which the post-war phenomenon of youth culture has defined itself and, in the process, changed not only what we see but how we see. From his early days as a maverick designer in Southern California's hot rod customizing subculture, through literary and aesthetic sophistication of his work for the legendary underground comic, Zap, and his later adoption by rock music as the voice of teen rebellion (following the use by some phenomenally successful bands of Williams' painting as their album cover art) he has always been ahead of his time while simultaneously defining it. With a devastatingly acerbic wit from which nothing and no one is safe, an iconography of transgression that articulates the irrational, an imagination that makes manifest the sublime demonology of desire and dread in a way that suspends belief, and a sense of the ridiculous that speaks rare truth, Robert Williams is nothing less than a national treasure.
This show coincides with the publication of Malicious Resplendence, a 300 page hardcover definitive retrospective of this great painter.
Please contact Hiroko Onoda for further information.
New Paintings
December 13, 1997 - January 31, 1998
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Williams. This inaugural exhibition will include 18 paintings as well as a number of works on paper.
Robert Williams has long been a controversial and celebrated master of the populist American vernacular in fine art. Often imitated but rarely equaled, he remains an enduring and visionary original. In a career that has spanned not only decades, but more significantly generations, Williams has made an indelible mark on popular culture and inspired legions of artists long before his relatively recent and much belated rise to prominence in the art world. By the time Williams' art finally received its critical acceptance and institutional acknowledgement in the Nineties (through such seminal museum exhibitions as Helter Skelter and Kustom Culture as well as innumerable reproductions and essays in magazines and books) he was already a living legend revered by many prominent film-makers, musicians, writers and artists of our age. In this way, the official neglect of his work has been as much a part of his myth as his international fame among kids, or his cult-like following along the cutting edge of contemporary artists, who have been deeply influenced by his distinctive graphic style, keen social eye, radical visual distortion, scandalously irreverent humor and unabidingly iconoclastic deconstruction of consensus reality.
Responsible for some of the most visually arresting, memorable and widely disseminated images to emerge out of the underground, Robert Williams provided the pictures by which the post-war phenomenon of youth culture has defined itself and, in the process, changed not only what we see but how we see. From his early days as a maverick designer in Southern California's hot rod customizing subculture, through literary and aesthetic sophistication of his work for the legendary underground comic, Zap, and his later adoption by rock music as the voice of teen rebellion (following the use by some phenomenally successful bands of Williams' painting as their album cover art) he has always been ahead of his time while simultaneously defining it. With a devastatingly acerbic wit from which nothing and no one is safe, an iconography of transgression that articulates the irrational, an imagination that makes manifest the sublime demonology of desire and dread in a way that suspends belief, and a sense of the ridiculous that speaks rare truth, Robert Williams is nothing less than a national treasure.
This show coincides with the publication of Malicious Resplendence, a 300 page hardcover definitive retrospective of this great painter.
Please contact Hiroko Onoda for further information.
