Native Bone and Far to Home

The Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, with the support of the Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Endowment and the Davidson College Friends of the Arts, are pleased to present Native Bone and Far to Home, an exhibition of oil paintings and works on paper by Kent Williams. The exhibition will be on view from November 5 through December 16, 2015.

For more than two decades, Kent Williams has built up a formidable reputation as a powerful contemporary painter. His work is characterized by strong, gestural forms combined with areas of arresting detail rendered with rich, dynamic brushwork. Boldly articulated figures are often obscured or surrounded by abstracted, neo-expressionistic environments. Williams’ approach to his subjects is subjective and intense, and there is often an autobiographical narrative at play. Favorite models, friends, and the artist himself all play a role in the human story of his paintings.

The exhibition at Davidson College features a diverse range of Williams’ work. Spanning from 2007 through his most current work, the gallery has both large-scale paintings and smaller drawings on display. A 44-page color catalogue was printed in conjunction with the exhibition, with an essay by Peter Frank and an interview between Lia Newman and the artist.

Williams lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He has a BFA in Drawing/Painting from Pratt Institute (1984). He has had solo exhibitions both across the United States at 101/EXHIBIT, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, and EVOKE Contemporary, and abroad at Société Danisco/Dupont, Daniel Maghen Galerie & Editions in Paris, and Blanc Gallery in the Philippines, to name a few. In 2001 he was the Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab/Sceenwriter’s Lab Fellow for the Sundance Institute, an exhibition coinciding with the annual Sundance Film Festival, in Sundance, Utah.

Image: In Sleep (Detail), 2013, oil on linen, 58 x 58 in., Courtesy of 101/EXHIBIT