Challenging common perceptions and the understandings of art and its history are the essence of much of LG Williams/Estate of LG Williams works. His conceptual pieces which often trigger mystery and ambiguity force us to reconsider familiar notions and mystify what we think we know already. Identified by a strong sense of irony and defying art conventions, Williams draws us into a fictitious existence where nothing you see or understand is actually what it is.
For his solo show at The Container, Anything But, Williams is creating a series of abstract drawings using painter’s tape in a range of colours. All square and overlapping, the layered images create a sense of depth and play on perspective, and while visually may be reminiscent of 1950-60’s American abstract expressionist works in first look, the works create corollaries for sometimes arcane literary, philosophical and historical conceptual art concepts.
Lately, Williams subject matter has expanded from cultural-identity-gender politics art to include forgotten figures from political, philosophical, and economic history as well as from forgotten artists from Artforum magazine. In “What The Fuck Rectangles #23”, he suggestively traces the lineage of economic theory by taping rectangles into a creviced rectangle, evoking something like a Mount Rectangle, which, in turn, creates a structural device that recalls his earlier use of rectangles from nearly a decade ago in which he blurred the traditional distinction between figure and ground and rectangle.
About the Artist
LG Williams was born in Shaver Lake, California in 1969 and lives and works on the road. He received his M.F.A from the University of California, Davis and B.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute. Williams has taught art, art history and art appreciation courses at the University of California-Davis, University of Southern California, California College of the Arts, and the University of Hawaii, to name a few. Author of many books and publications on art, art criticism, and poetry, Williams has appeared in Modern Painters, Juxtapoz, Artweek, Art Papers, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Tokyo Weekender Magazine, Honolulu Bulletin, Sacramento Bee, LA Weekly, Maui Weekly, SF Weekly, and The Bay Guardian. Williams’s most recent curatorial project was Wally Hedrick’s, War Room, at San Francisco International Art Fair.
His most recent book, Drawing Upon Art: A Workbook for Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (Cengage Learning / Wadsworth Publishing), was published in March 2009. LG Williams is also an established visual artist with an extensive national and international exhibition schedule. He has exhibited at various venues, among them The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia 2011, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa Art Preserve, Super Window Project, Lance Fung Gallery, Steven Wirtz Gallery, Gallery Subversive, and Lucerne Kuntzpanaorama. His artworks are featured in many important museums and private collections. According to Kenneth Baker, an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Williams wants to hold open a space in which painting might resume in earnest.” Williams recent, In Abstentia, at Super Window Projects was reviewed in Artforum magazine in May 2011.
