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POMERANZ COLLECTION

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

Window (with Window Cutaways)
2010
Gelatin silver print
framed 85,7 x 94,6 x 3,8 cm
Inv. Nr.161

Born in 1956 in Los Angeles, USA
Lives and works in USA

Christopher Williams is recognized as an important conceptual artist and photographer of his generation influenced by the first movement of the west coast conceptual artists, including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler.
His work, described by the art critic Tim Griffin as a “socio-photographic” approach of reality, is often seen as a critical study of photography itself as medium. More broadly however, his photographs question mutations of industrial culture and its modes of representation. Using methods of reproduction as a starting point, the artist manipulates common conventions of advertising by playing on the superficiality of the surface, thus interrogating the given conditions of modernity.
Deeply political, historical and sometimes personal, his photographs evoke a subtle change in our perception. In this way he focuses attention on the mechanisms of communication and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.
Window (with Window Cutaways) is a minimal photograph depicting, as the title suggests, a corner of a window with window fractions cut away inside. Seemingly a trivial subject, the artist presents a mise en abyme of the photographed object. A dichotomous confusion results as the photographic technique itself, full of textural and tonal variety, intercepts the place of the literal subject presented within the photo.