Looking forward to a comprehensive retrospective of American painter Sue Williams (b. 1954, Chicago Heights, Illinois) at the Belvedere in Vienna – scheduled for early 2026. Since the late 1980s, Williams has been exploring themes of power and oppression, gender relations, and body politics in her paintings and drawings. She consistently pursues a critical feminist agenda within a field that has long been considered a quintessentially patriarchal domain, which Williams brilliantly navigates using a variety of painterly strategies.

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 violence, 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.

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.

Sue Williams was born in Chicago in 1954. She received her BFA in 1976 from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Working predominantly with oil and acrylic on canvas, Williams came to prominence in the early 1980s, exploring themes of postmodern feminism and personal experience. Influenced by the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism, Williams merges colorful abstraction with feminist sexual imagery, inspiring a dynamism and unconventional theatricality unique to her work.

SUE WILLIAMS
BELVEDERE 21
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
Through 7 June 2026
www.belvedere.at

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