KENT WILLIAMS
About Kent Williams
Kent Williams has built up a formidable reputation as a powerful contemporary draftsman and painter. His is a bold realist with combined attributes of abstraction and neo-expressionistic sensibilities. His work is characterized by strong gestural forms combined with areas of layered and arresting detail, rendered with rich dynamic brushwork.
Williams’ approach to his subjects is often subjective and intense. Whether through multi-figured compositional complexity and suggestive narrative, or with the straight-forward lone human form, there is often autobiographical narrative at play. Favorite models, friends, and the artist himself all play a role in the human story of his paintings.
Williams lives in Los Angeles. He has two sons, Kerig Sun and Ian Kai.
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“There are precedents for such contrasting formal languages occurring within a single painting (or, as in the case of Gerhard Richter, occurring within a single oeuvre)... Larry Rivers’ proto-pop painterliness zoomed in and out of focus and scattered his subjects around the compositions they occupy. Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy, among other surrealists, blurred the line between the optically credible and the physically impossible. Gustav Klimt enveloped his sensuous, stylized figures in swaths and curtains of pattern. Victorian academicians, British and American, as diverse as John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Frederick Lord Leighton, combined emphatically hyper-realistic passages – faces and details of clothing, for instance – with much more painterly areas surrounding them. The later mural-size paintings of J. M. W. Turner (in uncanny anticipation of photography’s liberating effect on painting) deposited heroic figures in the midst of all-but- disintegrated land- and seascapes. Williams acknowledges these influences to various degrees.
Williams is a worthy inheritor of these august forerunners, technically gifted and spiritually motivated, as they were, by the acts of painting and drawing themselves. He participates in a dynamic, polemical, historically self-conscious resuscitation of representational painting currently occurring throughout the United States, and nowhere more than in southern California, where Williams currently lives and works. Painters like Williams are clearly attached to a tradition but compelled to advance it by embracing contrary traditions – abstraction, surrealism, naturalism – and by inventing a cohesive, if deliberately unstable, whole. Unstable neither in its actual imagery nor in its painterly practice, Kent Williams’ art distinguishes itself for its fully reasoned method and its particular, often unique, characteristics. But it is unstable – thrillingly, potently unstable – in its acceptance of contradictory visual languages and its ability to orchestrate those languages into a pictorially and discursively vibrant way of painting the human condition.”
–Peter Frank
From the exhibition catalog, Kent Williams: Native Bone and Far to Home, Davidson College, 2015
Selected Awards and Honors
Yellow Kid; Lucca, Italy's prestigious comics award
Fellowship at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab in Sundance, UT, 2001
Education
The Pratt Institute, New York
2025
Looking and Seeing. Kent Williams: Self-Portrait as Rodin’s Striding Man, with Appendages. John O’Hern
2023
The Kwaidan Collection, co-authored by Lafcadio Hearn and Kent Williams, introduction by Darren Aronofsky, foreword by Kyoko Yoshida, afterword by Bon Koizumi. Beehive Books, Philadelphia, PA
2022
American Art Collector. Ghost Stories
2020
American Art Collector. Shared Folklore. Michael Clawson
The Gutter Review. Kent Williams: Beyond ‘Blood’ and More than ‘Meltdown’. Chloe Maveal
2018
Arrested Motion. Previews: Kent Williams - “Zoetic Trinity” @ Evoke Contemporary
Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Artist vs Artist. Richard Purssey
Pasatiempo. Kent Williams at Evoke Contemporary. Michael Abatemarco
American Art Collector. Truthful Artifice. Michael Clawson
Blood: A Tale. J.M. DeMatteis. Pipoca & Nanquim, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2017
Art Week. His Paintings are a Vibrant and Intense Combination of Abstraction and Figuritism, Kent Williams Tells Us More About His Work and His Exploration of Our Sense of Perception. Hannah Smith
Kent Williams - Not Strangers: Drawings in Mixed Media. ASFA, Pacific Grove, CA
2016
American Art Collector. Engaging the Medium
BOOOOOOOM. Artist Spotlight: Kent Williams. Jeff Hamada
Kent Williams-Via Lactea: His Drawings and Paintings of the Artist Soey Milk. Ryan Ebelt. ASFA, Pacific Grove, CA
Hi-Fructose. Kent Williams Curates ‘Emotional Content’ with 9 Artists at Evoke Contemporary
2015
The Charlotte Observer. Exhibition of Work North Carolina Native Kent Williams on Display at Davidson College. Mark Leach
Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Kent Williams’ Fantastical Fine Art. Evan Senn
Fine Art Connoisseur-Fine Art Today. Bones with Flesh. Andrew Webster
Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College. “Exhibition of Work North Carolina Native Kent Williams on Display at Davidson College” in the Charlotte Observer
Widewalls. Kent Williams. Aya N.I.
2014
Hi-Fructose. Preview: Kent Williams’s “How Human of You” at 101/Exhibit
Creative Boom. How Human of You by Kent Williams. Katy Cowan
The Passenger Times. Kent Williams: Lord of the Flies. Nicoletta Lolli
2013
Hi-Fructose. Basel Week Preview: Pulse and Miami Project. Nastia Voynovskaya
Kent Williams: Ophthalmic. Alex Ross. 3A Publishing, Kowloon, Hong Kong
YouTube: Fully Booked. Kent Williams
2011
Kent Williams: Eklektikos. Peter Frank, Alex Ross. ASFA, Pacific Grove, CA
Bl!sss magazine. The Art of Kent Williams pp. 66-71. Robert Mann
ArtFixx. Kent Williams: Painting. Wendy Campbell
BOOOOOOOM. Kent Williams. Jeff Hamada
2010
Visual Art Source. Kent Williams. Alex Ross
2007
Kent Williams: Amalgam, Paintings and Drawings 1992-2007. Julia Morton, Edward Lucie-Smith. Allen Spiegel Fine Arts, Pacific Grove, CA
Unknow date
Art Sheep. Art-Sheep Features: Kent Williams; Dreamy Worlds of Reality (NSFW)
Available Work
Self-portrait as Rodin's Striding Man, with Appendages
Incognito
Hike Thru Bailey Canyon
Strings and Rope
Ouroboros (study)
Blue Point
Porcelain Stance
Asleep
Ragalia
Tracy with Love
She Wore Lemon
Palm Wing
Corvus 11
In Love 2
Porcelain with Orange
Adjunct with Pink and Yellow
Crossed, 2016
Corvus Quietus
Raven II
Paradise Bound 1
Romantique
With Klimt Looking On
Still Life with Vases and Organic Matter
Repose with Gold & Red
Cat
Raven
Stare at Me: Out from the Madding Crowd
Tomorrow
Cat
Osseous Matter, Crown
In Love 1
In Love 3
Cool with Red
Vases: Ensor
The Reveal, triptych
Kaonashi
Ukiyo
Ukio, study
Devon's Back
Ultima Blonde Natalia
Topsy Turvy
Headdress
In Profile, study
Upright
Asilomar
Tilt
Soldier of Peace
Planetary Dress, study
Planetary Dress
Osseous Matter
Osseous Matter, 1
Osseous Matter, 2
Osseous Matter, 3
Onezee with Unicorn Hat
Repose with Blue and Rose
Convergence: Yumi
Nude Sitting
New Year
Natalia Standing
The Reveal, study 2
Lover(s)
Lil'Bit Contemplative
Sultry
Sea Foam
Floral with Pink
Blossomy
Blond Natalia Again
Blonde Natalia, Paint Can and Orange Electric Cord
Crawl
Lord of The Flies, 2
Lord of The Flies, 4
Lord of The Flies, 6
Lord of The Flies, 7
Erotica
1962, study
Quilt Wrap
Disposition
Warm with Red
Alternate Figure study Blue Rose, 1
Alternate Figure study Blue Rose, 2
Girl with Glasses
