NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Berggruen will present new paintings by Brittney Leeanne Wiiliams at The Armory Show (September 5-7, 2025 / VIP Preview — September 4, 2025).
Speaking about her work, Williams stated:
My work explores the body as a site of transcendence, memorialization, suffering, and as a liminal device to the mystical. While my paintings are often figurative, my concerns are conceptual as I grapple with the articulation of the body as both subject and object, engaging ideas of presence and absence. In addition, the body, natural world and architecture often blend and reflect each other in my work. I use the color red--symbolic of a signal--to speak to the Black experience, frequently centering a red Black body as the starting place for a painting.
This exhibition represents two strands in my current work. First, I draw on biblical genre paintings of angelic visitation and revelation. In reimagining these tableaux, I often redact the angel or other biblical figure while emphasizing the materiality of drapery as a trace of their presence. Rather than the revelator appearing in human form, the angelic figure is absent, only suggested by their vacated robes. They are stripped of a figure yet are still present. One of these paintings continues my Interruption series, which riffs on neo-classical figurations of statuary and drapery. The interruption depicted in this canvas operates on the level of the picture plane and thematically, as the figures are disrupted by unseen revelations. The drapes in this image complicate the relationship between the figure and ground, foreground and background.
In addition, some of the works in this exhibition operate like talismans or icons. I think of these paintings as aspiring to the power that Simon Critchley ascribes to medieval Christian symbols: “Devotional objects and images impel the attentive viewer to both see the literal thing in front of them and to see beyond. To see both at once.” (Simon Critchley, Mysticism). Again, drapery floats, suggesting an unseen form. The image of the eye that occasionally appears here, sometimes projecting out from a praying form, sometimes framing a ritual token, is a gesture of seeing while being seen. The occasional submissive yet entreating body becomes the source of vision. Activating these eyes evokes being witnessed by the art object, thus evoking the feeling that they themselves see.
This solo booth follows the gallery’s two solo shows with the artist Brittney Leeanne Williams: Huddle (November 30, 2023-January 10, 2024) and Brittney Leeanne Williams: The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back (March 5-April 14, 2021). Williams was included in the gallery’s booth at FOG Design+Art (January 19-23, 2022) and in the group shows The Natural World: Part II (March 9-April 13, 2022) and Quarters: Anne Buckwalter, Dustin Hodges, JJ Manford, Brittney Leeanne Williams (March 18-May 27, 2020).
Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990, Pasadena, CA) has been featured in exhibitions at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; The Hole, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Monique Meloche, Chicago, IL; Mamoth, London, UK; Carl Kostyál, Milan, IT and Stockholm, SE; Para Site, Hong Kong, CN; Galerie Droste, Paris, FR; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, GE; Newchild, Antwerp, BE; Collaborations, Copenhagen, DK; and at institutions such as Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco, CA; and Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA; among others. Her work is represented in various public collections, including the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; the Domus Collection, New York, NY and Beijing, CN; HE Art Museum (HEM), CN; Fundacion Medianoche0, Granada, ES; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. She is a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient. Williams’s artist residencies include Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Fores Project, UK; Arts + Public Life; and McColl Center. Alexander Berggruen represents the artist.
