From 1997 to 1999, Sue Williams was a visiting professor and led the master class for representative painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her teaching activities and exchanges with a younger generation of artists in Vienna—including Katrin Plavčak and Sevda Chkoutova—form another backdrop to this exhibition.
Belvedere General Director Stella Rollig: Sue Williams has created a body of work that is deeply personal yet also addresses intensely controversial social issues. Especially in today’s global political climate, it is important to us to be a platform for feminist positions that uncompromisingly center on power structures, violence, and the conditions of freedom.
Williams has been exploring gender relations, body politics, power, and oppression through the medium of painting since the late 1980s. Long regarded as a paradigmatically patriarchal domain, she navigates this field brilliantly using a variety of painterly strategies.
Curator Luisa Ziaja:
A constant in Sue Williams’s oeuvre is her systematic questioning of the medium of painting and the conventions of figuration and abstraction, whose boundaries she is forever challenging. Humorously and unrelentingly, she navigates the fault lines of power and tells of structural violence, individual trauma, memory, and resilience.
At a time when it seemed almost inconceivable that painting could be a feminist medium, Sue Williams resolutely chose to confront her personal experiences on canvas. Williams’s early works showed Scenes of everyday violence against women with unflinching anger and brought her fame almost overnight in the early 1990s.
Works such as TRY TO BE MORE ACCOMMODATING (1991) and A FUNNY THING HAPPENED (1992) combine brutal scenes with sarcastic, terse texts to create disturbingly unambiguous depictions that simultaneously lay bare the mechanisms used to silence survivors and trivialize their suffering. Meanwhile, in THE ART WORLD CAN SUCK MY PROVERBIAL DICK (1992), she takes aim at the patriarchal art industry, its long-standing dependence structures, and enduringly misogynous discourses.
From the mid-1990s Sue Williams radically changed her painting strategy: Text and narrative scenes became less important, while figures and body fragments on an often-monochrome ground took on a life of their own. Williams’s interest in the painterly, the brushstroke, repetition, and tempo is unmistakable here and becomes a constant in her practice, even in later stages of her oeuvre. Her ironic adoption of the allover technique of male-coded Abstract Expressionism gave rise to large-format, gesturally abstract compositions. Works such as LOTS OF COLORS (1997) and MOM’S FOOT BLUE AND ORANGE (1997) are characteristic of this period in which distorted body parts, reproductive organs, and fetishistically charged motifs emerge from the tangle of lines—visually appealing but by no means harmless.
Around the turn of the millennium, Williams’s painting was dominated by the expressive and vibrant line. These seemingly “pleasant” lines and cheerful colors are soon revealed as ambiguous. Purportedly liberated from any reference to reality, physicality is intrinsic to the painterly gesture in RED AND PURPLE DEAL (2001)—the abstraction remains deceptive, with Williams deliberately confounding expectations of her painting. From the early 2000s onwards, Williams' increasingly detailed, ornamental all-over compositions explicitly respond to socio-political events such as the “War on Terror” proclaimed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Paintings such as HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION (2006) and LEO STRAUSS, THEORETICIAN (2008) express states of political and psychological Trauma in fragmented, organic pictorial forms.
In the 2010s Williams progressively associated global crises with personal loss and trauma. Her painting technique became freer, more expressive, more kinetic. MINISTRY OF HATE (2013) exemplifies this period in which fragments of text, architectural motifs—including the Twin Towers—and dynamic lines and explosions of color converge. Given her ongoing questioning of her medium, her most recent paintings, including THE COSMOS ABOVE (2023) and PRESENT (2025), can be interpreted as the synthesis of earlier stages of her oeuvre: On unprimed canvases grotesque, hovering figurations condense into dreamlike pictorial arrangements of recurrent motifs and topics.
Arranged chronologically, the exhibition WHAT NOW presents over one hundred works by the artist—paintings, drawings, collages, and select sculptures from every creative period—from the late 1980s to the present. It is in the simultaneity of the personal and the political, humorous caricature, almost shocking explicitness, and painterly gestures that Sue Williams’s works unfold their compelling force. The succinct and stirring title conveys the deeply felt urgency of facing up to the realities of our present.
