Press
Release
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Exhibition in the Galleries of Magasin from May 28 to September
10, 2000
Curator : Yves Aupetitallot
For about two decades, Christopher Williams has produced photographically
based works that address both diverse and complex issues, ranging from
the various definitions of beauty, their cognitive and interpretative
systems, to the gaze and reception of the viewer, etc. Even though his
work originates in an elaborate critical and analytical body, Christopher
Williams, trained at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, under
the influence of John Baldessari, always pays great attention to both
the visual pleasure and the presentation of his work.
Since the early 80s, his work has gradually yet distinctly changed. The
early photographic series were based on existing photographs, either directly
appropriated or re-photographed. These images were culled from photographic
archives, stock photo houses, libraries, and museums.
Following this, he began to produce original photographs of various objects
from institutional collections - glass models of botanical specimens for
example. More recently, Williams has been making photographs that bear
no objective trace to an institutional source, usually museums, preferring
to broaden the initial concept of institution, highlighting the conceptual
and political grids at their roots and identifying the way art objects
and knowledge are produced, exposed and recorded for history.
Die Welt is schön, a direct quotation of German photographer Albert
Renger-Patzsch's 1928 book, is the generic title of each of Christopher Williams'
new works or new series of photographs. Using clearly identified categories, Die
Welt is schön presents a great number of photographs on various subjects,
plants, architecture, people, landscapes, and fosters a reading of the world,
of its organization and its representation. Through this quotation, Christopher
Williams, taking a distant and critical stand, draws attention to the modernist
bias, to its styles, to its genres, and to the confident belief in technology
and in an orderly and supposedly objective vision of the world underlying the
various institutional models quoted above.
The exhibition at Magasin gathers almost all the photographic series produced
since 1997, the year of his last significant monographic exposition at the Boijmans
Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Some works from the early 1990s, considered
to be at the foundation of this last period, will also be presented. A total
of around 50 works will be on display.
Christopher Williams was born in 1956. He lives and works in
Los Angeles.