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Books Angola to Vietnam, Christopher Williams 97 Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada | ||
Christopher Williams (born 1956, Los Angeles) is an American conceptual artist and fine art photographer. He lives in Cologne and works in Düsseldorf.
Contents
- Early life and education
- Work
- Publications
- Solo exhibitions
- Exhibitions with others
- Awards
- Collections
- Literature
- References
Early life and education
In the 1970s and early 1980s, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts where he received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. under the first generation of West Coast conceptual artists including John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher. Since October 2008 he has been a professor in photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His wife is curator and former Stedelijk Museum director Ann Goldstein.
Work
Writing in Artforum in 2007, art critic Tim Griffin described Williams's approach as "sociophotographic." It has been said that Williams works within the tradition of institutional critique within what Sven Lütticken describes as an informal group, along with Willem de Rooij, Jeroen de Rijke and Mathias Poledna, that investigates the "parameters of the exhibition space." Chronologically, however, he belongs to the Pictures Generation, whose members include Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, James Welling and Louise Lawler. In 1982 Williams had his first solo exhibition at Jancar Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles.
Angola to Vietnam is a photography portfolio of glass flowers.
In 2000, at an exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery, in New York, Williams showed twenty photographs including a series of pictures of a 1964 Renault automobile on its side. Writing in The New York Times Ken Johnson said, "the Renault was made in a French factory where significant revolutionary activities took place in 1968; hence it is tipped up like a barricade."
Williams' photographs oftentimes show increasingly obsolescent film-based equipment — cameras, lenses and darkroom gear — as beautiful and precise as catalog product shots. The accompanying text adds detail about how the equipment was used. Made by a professional photographer who follows Williams's directions, the conventionally scaled pictures have the glossy lucidity of excellent commercial photographs.
Publications
Solo exhibitions
Since joining David Zwirner in 2000, Williams has had five solo exhibitions at the gallery in New York.
Exhibitions with others
Awards
Collections
Williams' work is held in the following museum collections: