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Sue Williams
In spring 2026, the Belvedere 21 will present a comprehensive retrospective of American painter Sue Williams (b. 1954, Chicago Heights, Illinois). Since the late 1980s, Williams has been exploring themes of power and oppression, gender relations, and body politics in her paintings and drawings. She consistently pursues a critical feminist agenda within a field that has long been considered a quintessentially patriarchal domain, which Williams brilliantly navigates using a variety of painterly strategies.
Curated by Luisa Ziaja.
Assistant Curator: Katarina Lozo
Belvedere 21
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Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Vienna
Getting there
The Exhibition
Sue Williams’s early works are characterized by a cartoon-like style, often rendered in black and white, confronting sexualized violence and misogyny with unflinching rage. Over the course of the 1990s, she developed a gestural, abstract visual language that gradually moved away from narrative elements, instead becoming dominated by dynamic brushwork and vibrant color. Nevertheless, the themes of the body, power, and violence remain ever-present: from a distance, her compositions may appear as ornamental all-overs, but up close, they reveal a surprising specificity of motifs, as abstract patterns morph into anthropomorphic corporeality.
In the early 2000s, Williams reduced her compositions to bold, often neon-colored lines that evoke phallic forms, parodying the heroic masculinity of Abstract Expressionism and ironically subverting it. In response to socio-political developments in the US and beyond, her paintings from the 2010s— kinetic explosions of color and form— reflect contemporary dystopias defined by war, terror, and manipulative media. Recent works, however, combine elements from earlier phases of Williams’s practice to create complex, intricate pictorial arrangements that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, and tell of structural violence, individual trauma, memory, and resilience.
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 exhibition at Belvedere 21 features paintings, drawings, and collages that span all phases of the artist’s career, from the late 1980s to the present.
Biography
Sue Williams was born in 1954 in Chicago Heights, Illinois. After studying at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia and at Cooper Union in New York, she began exhibiting extensively in the 1980s. Williams held solo exhibitions at institutions including the Secession in Vienna, IVAM in Valencia, Centre d’art contemporain Genève, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Künstlerhaus Graz, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She participated multiple times in the Whitney Biennial (1993, 1995, 1997) and was invited to numerous international group exhibitions. In 1993, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2009, the Painters & Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In the 1990s, she held a professorship in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Williams’s works are represented in public and private collections across the United States and Europe, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Centre d’art contemporain Genève; The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Sue Williams lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
