In 2020 and 2021, Michael Williams created six large-scale paintings for the Lokremise in St. Gallen, which will be presented there for the first time. In Los Angeles, where he has lived with his family since 2019, the situation was the same as around the world. During the lockdown, his children mostly stayed at home for almost a year. There were no openings and no trips; instead, it was time to retreat to the studio.
During this period he created historical paintings in an almost classical style. The Collage Paintings are the result of computer-generated overlays and combinations that were applied to a canvas as paper printouts and then reworked with paint. They are collages like those that have been made since the liberating days of Dada when photographic images from newspapers and magazines first made their way into art.
The serious restrictions on our daily life outside our own homes resulted in a natural concentration on the private sphere, so that much of our experience during the recent pandemic has been focused on the historical nuclear family. This remained our only direct contact, surrounded by a limitless trauma of global proportions. Michael Williams’s pictures reflect, change, and move our gaze from outward to inward, and thus these new works have certainly incorporated aspects of this time, even though the Collage Paintings do not directly reference the Covid-19 pandemic. They represent a great abundance and a unique distillation of a time and will be on view in the Kunstzone (art space) of the Lokremise.
Curator: Roland Wäspe
Michael Williams: Make Plans God Applauds runs from 28 August – 7 November 2021 at Lokremise St.Gallen
For further information visit https://www.kunstmuseumsg.ch/en/michael-williams
About Author
