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Best Intentions
Robert Williams December 13, 2000 - February 10, 2001 Artist Bio Press Release Images Back to Exhibition List |
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Best Intentions
Robert Williams
December 13, 2000 - February 10, 2001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Williams, which will include 18 paintings and 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 last decade (through such seminal museum exhibitions as Helter Skelter and Kustom Culture, Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Low Riders and American Car Culture, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and Made In California, Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA) he was already a living legend revered by many prominent film-makers, musicians, writers and artists of our time. 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 he has always been a total original, 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.
Please contact Hiroko Onoda for further information.
Robert Williams
December 13, 2000 - February 10, 2001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Williams, which will include 18 paintings and 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 last decade (through such seminal museum exhibitions as Helter Skelter and Kustom Culture, Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Low Riders and American Car Culture, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and Made In California, Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA) he was already a living legend revered by many prominent film-makers, musicians, writers and artists of our time. 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 he has always been a total original, 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.
Please contact Hiroko Onoda for further information.
