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Semjon Contemporary

Awkward Uncertainty

Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pa.; lives and works in Los Angeles) makes work that interrogates the history of painting, often by dismantling its components into their constituent parts. His pictures employ form to reflect on the complexity and contradictions of modern life. He works on canvas, availing himself of a range of techniques including oil painting, collage, and inkjet prints. In his new works, Williams examines the relationship between painting and photography, transferring the chilly aloofness that is characteristic of the latter onto the former. The photographic “negative” yields a smooth canvas disencumbered of its painterly qualities and the medium’s historic ballast. The book includes several foldout plates that illustrate Williams’s creative approach, and a brief essay by his Austrian fellow painter Tobias Pils.

Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Sevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.

Painterly Investigations of the Present

For over four decades, Jean-Marie Biwer (b. 1957, Dudelange, Luxembourg; lives and works in Basbellain, Luxembourg) has made art that records his fine-grained observations. Grappling with the grand themes of art history – the landscape, the human figure, the still life – Biwer consistently questions the role painting can play in a world shaped by a deluge of images and information. Responding to the omnipresence of the latter and reacting to the increasingly frantic pace of our lives, he creates paintings that allow the intensity of the present moment to unfold. The richly illustrated book gathers his most important works since 2005.

“These things are there, we just need to look at them. They are simple, but today they have the power to bring so much to people.”—Jean-Marie Biwer

Jean-Marie Biwer’s work has been shown throughout Europe and in 1993 he represented Luxembourg at the 45th Biennale di Venezia. His works can be found in the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc-Jean amongst others.