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Spanierman Gallery, LLC announces the presentation of the first two segments of an ongoing museum-quality survey of the work of American painter Neil Williams (1934-1988) to be held at Spanierman Gallery, LLC, at East Hampton (July 2-August 3) and at Art Hamptons 2009 (July 10-12). Curated by the noted writer and critic Ed Leffingwell (former director of visual arts for the City of Los Angeles and chief curator of P.S. 1 in New York City), the two shows will bring to light the work of an artist who played a significant role in the art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. As Roy Lichtenstein commented: “Neil Williams had an important underground reputation as a serious artist, apart from the commercial mainstream.”
Largely unknown today in the precincts of American contemporary art as a consequence of his decision to decamp to Brazil after a working visit in 1982, throughout his career Williams engaged in dialogue with a number of groundbreaking artists of the time. In the early 1960s, he shared a loft with Mark di Suvero and Robert Grosvenor and shortly thereafter became closely associated with Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, and Larry Poons. The poet Robert Creeley was a friend and admirer. Throughout the years of these and other collegial associations Williams worked against the tide while drawing inspiration from the heady period of experimentation in which his work evolved. He played a critical role in the development of geometric abstraction, the shaped canvas, and Systemic painting, producing a diverse and compelling body of work.
Spanierman Gallery, LLC, at East Hampton will present a survey of Williams’s art, encompassing geometric, fluorescent oil-based shaped paintings such as Jack O’Diamonds (1966) as well as color-field paintings, including A Song of Unending Sorrow (late 1960s). Also on view will be works Williams evolved in the early 1970s consisting of a technique of sculptural collage, applying boldly hued dried skins of acrylic paint directly to the canvas. While continuing to emphasize the structural integrity of his support, in these images Williams embraced an original painterly abstract mode. In late colorful abstractions he synthesized landscape and floral elements inspired by his experience of Brazil; as Leffingwell has written: “In Brazil Williams fused the tropical and the urban concrete.”
Spanierman at Art Hamptons will showcase the revolutionary shaped canvases that Williams pioneered in the mid-1960s. One of the first to explore their aesthetic potential Williams produced finely crafted geometric paintings distinguished by a vibrant palette and hard-won stance. At the same time, their eccentric shapes challenge the confinement of architectural settings, freeing painting from constrictive boundaries. Among the works on view is an untitled painting of 1964 from Williams’s noted Paris Series. A similar image was described by Ellen H. Johnson in a significant article in Artnews (1965) as having a surface resembling “colored blocks colliding and multiplying themselves like particles of energy.” Johnson stated that it was interesting “to realize that although Williams has little scientific training, he is interested in the philosophies of modern mathematics and physics and reads widely in these fields.”
Williams was born in Bluff, Utah, in 1934. He studied at the California School of Fine Arts, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959. By the following year Williams had moved to New York City and begun to exhibit his work. His first solo show was at Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery in Manhattan in 1964. That same year, he participated in the exhibition The Shaped Canvas organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum where his work hung alongside that of Stella, Paul Feeley, and Sven Lukin. In the ensuing years, Williams’s paintings appeared in a number of group shows devoted to advanced trends in American art, including Systemic Painting (1966), a second show curated by Alloway for the Guggenheim. Williams also had one-man exhibitions at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York and the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles.
Although Williams exhibited regularly in New York and could often be seen at the legendary Max’s Kansas City, he gradually distanced himself from the downtown art scene, spending the majority of his time in Sagaponack, New York, where in 1972 he and Stella had purchased the former potato barn, located along the Railroad tracks at the bend of Narrow Lane and Wainscott Harbor Road. They divided the building into two huge living and studio spaces. Williams remained there until 1986, when he moved permanently to Brazil, which he explained to friends that he liked because of its European feel.
Williams taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York and held guest professorships at Metro State College in Denver and at Syracuse University. With an applied interest in film, he also developed several screenplays, including a script that dealt with the contemporary history of the Navajo. In 1986 a retrospective of Williams’s work organized by Leffingwell and Bellamy was held at the Clocktower, a well-known alternative gallery in New York. Williams’s career was cut short by his untimely death in New York on March 25, 1988 at the age of fifty-three. In his obituary, the New York Times described him as an “artist’s artist” who was “not well known to the general public, but was greatly admired by his peers.”
Williams’s work can be found in public collections throughout the United States, including the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; the MIT—List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Denver Art Museum; the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York; the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A posthumous exhibition of Williams’s work was held at the Galleria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1989. |
