Sue Williams

Yes, that’s right: “Trump Not Funny.” And yet, coming across this statement as the title of a large oil painting in Sue Williams’s exhibition is surprising. The President-elect is nowhere to be seen in it, nor are there any references to his characteristics or qualities. Though perhaps there are, as is so often the case with this artist’s paintings, allusions to sex and heteronormative power hidden in the nonfigurative, expressive swirls of yellow, blue, and orange-red color fields rapidly applied to the canvas.

This show is a delight––even if, for beholders of all genders, the sensuality of the works’ surfaces quickly turns to frustration upon a closer look, one always has visual pleasure. And as with the work of Marlene Dumas or Maria Lassnig, it does not wear off so quickly with this exceptional painter’s. Moreover, it is rekindled again and again. The eleven eruptive oil paintings here, all in approximately the same landscape format, succeed at full tilt. Mostly made this year, they are contrasted with five very small works from 1994 to 1996. These drawings done in acrylic stage their social critique and engagement very explicitly. While their backgrounds consist of bright kitschy patterned textile samples, the figures prove to be male-dominated in crude, threatening scenes.

With these in-limbo images, an observer can fill in the lines like the crack of a whip; the knots of color, erasures, and explosions of Williams’s newest paintings seem to render ecstatic stories of relationships in which, existentially, no less is at stake than the whole.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.