Michael Williams: Frogs 1 – 9 Event

Opening on Thursday, June 2, 6 – 9 pm
In Conversation: Michael Williams & Pamela Kort, 7 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present Frogs 1 – 9, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with the American artist Michael Williams. Frogs 1 – 9 is Williams’ first solo exhibition in Austria.

In past bodies of work, Michael Williams has developed a suite of interconnected paintings out of a drawing, not uncommonly focused on a human figure or surrogate. In the case of Frogs 1 – 9, the source is Untitled (Frog) (2019–2020): a small sheet given over to a greying man-cum-jester, hollowed nostrils shaped like an electrical outlet and mouth agape, forming an unlikely heart. There, in his domestic sanctum, he dons a bell-tipped fool’s hat—historically, the triangular protrusions recapitulated asses’ ears—and gaudy checkered sweater. His thumb and middle finger pinch a splayed frog that stares back at its reciprocally confounded wide-eyed captor. The tone is jocular as befits its comic protagonist. But it also recalls the morality play of Puritan theology, as exemplified by Jonathan Edwards’ sermon equating the precarity of human life to that of a spider dangling over a fire (a none too subtle analogy for the proximity of Hell). The jester and frog reappear in related sketches suggesting defeat—Untitled (Wipeout) (2022) literally spells this out—and the cap ‘n’ bells transmogrifies into a fleshy body atop a gold-rimmed plate in Untitled (Mar-A-Lago) (2022), a perfectly horrible cannibalistic feast.