Sue Williams at 303 Gallery, New York, 2 March – 15 April
Continuing the general theme: ‘It’s really about boys, isn’t it?’ Sue Williams told an interviewer around the time of her last show at 303 Gallery, in 2014, a couple of decades on from her calling-card works mixing elements of counterculture cartooning, all-over abstraction and suggestions of domestic violence. The paintings she was talking about – centrifugally lyrical abstract-expressionist from a distance, seeded with pungently gendered figuration up close – featured an aroused male kangaroo, the Twin Towers and phalluses in general. ‘It’s becoming more of a fascist world,’ Williams said, considering the authoritarian fallout of 9/11. Judging by what we’ve seen of the paintings she’s made while chickens came home to roost, her tenth show with the gallery will tweak her latter-day, warped-Helen Frankenthaler mode. The compositions feel vivid and spacious, in an outwardly welcoming manner; but zoom in and you notice ripped architecture, fragmentary male figures, hand- writing and tumbling dice: a timely synecdoche for high-stakes political gambling.
