MICHAEL WILLIAMS: PILINGS
DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY is pleased to present PILINGS, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Michael Williams.
November 07 – December 13, 2025
The focus of the show is a series of seven interrelated paintings, rooted in visual observation and the still life genre, in which Williams turns his eye to the physical and emotional space of the painting studio and the objects, light, and questions that occupy it. The exhibition is on view at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. in Los Angeles from November 7 through December 13, 2025. An opening reception will take place on Friday, November 7 from 6 to 8 PM.
The paintings in PILINGS depict a variably identifiable space in which certain objects—a table, a golf bag, a food co-op ID, a chair—appear in different ways and juxtapositions. The canvases also share a common palette in which lavender, peach, and grey tones predominate. Within this seemingly limited range of attributes, however, Williams conjures fields of textures, marks, and forms that resist easy description or characterization. To make the series, he began with a first painting of a studio still life scene; subsequent paintings include images of the previous ones, which become more and less recognizable depending on his intuitive responses to each work as it evolved.
This process, which is somehow both linear and non-linear, is emblematic of Williams’s two-decade trajectory and the many different—and sometimes seemingly contradictory—modes he has used to make paintings. He has availed himself of traditional acrylic and oil paints, pens and pencils, computers and inkjet printers, and many kinds of actual and implied collage. Similarly, his subject matter has included everything from overarching themes of global importance to the minutiae of his own life, and it has been rendered with dead-serious forays into abstraction and formalism as well as palpable doses of humor.
Drawing, with its potential for material directness and formal diversity, has played an important role in Williams’s work since the beginning of his career. Accordingly, the drawings that appear in PILINGS reflect the ways in which Williams challenges himself to question the most basic and foundational pretenses that guide the production of art, with special attention paid to his own ideas, habits, and view of the world.