Co-Chief Art Critics John Vincler and Johanna Fateman join forces this week to present a few of their favorites on view in New York now.
Sue Williams, "Unspeakable"
303 Gallery | 555 West 21st Street
Through December 20
Since the late '80s, the painter Sue Williams has, with uncouth feminist candor, exposed both deep and just-below-the-surface cultural undercurrents of sexual violence and patriarchal power. In early canvases, she deployed the cartooning style of a toilet-stall vandal; later, she found painterly analogues to misogyny in the muscular expressionist traditions of art history, embedding fragmented imagery in savvily borrowed gestures. Veering from crude figuration to abstraction, and then back to representational work—but with a more graceful line—she has achieved a command of both modes, and an eerie fluency in a host of historical styles.
