Rachel Eulena Williams

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991, Miami, FL) creates highly colorful and textural works out of paint, rope, canvas, paper, and other objects that she exactingly jumbles together with glue, staples, ties, screws, and hooks.

Working in the liminal space between painting and sculpture, legibility and abstraction, and color and line, Williams creates networks of interrelation and connection.

Williams’s playful approach is liberated from traditional constraints such as the rectangular frame of the stretcher bar or the unimpeachable canvas surface. Her works demonstrate painted form pushed to its limits. In her words, “play is vital…When you’re playing, it gives you this freedom.” Williams works in the lineage of artists such as Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Suzanne Jackson, and Elizabeth Murray, who, in the 1970s and 1980s, took painting apart in order to reassemble it, pushing at the very boundaries of the medium.

Her practice is deeply rooted in the act of drawing, with sketches on paper or digital drawings serving as the starting points for her wall-bound constructions. The artist translates line into three dimensions via snaking segments of rope that act as bounding structures. After putting the ropes into place, Williams applies vibrant shades of color that act as a bridge between the painted and sculptural components of the work. Color is an integral part of her constructions and she frequently turns to a vibrant, wide-ranging palette that has largely been considered vulgar in Western art history. After the ropes are in place, Williams adds cut-out canvas scraps in various sizes, shapes, and colors, as well as other materials that are added through a process of layering what she calls “tactile information.” Sometimes these pieces are trimmed away, saved, and added to other works in progress. All of the physical elementswork with the forces of gravity to give shape to the three-dimensional compositions. Recently, she has used armatures derived from hammocks—defying rope’s conventionaluses and contexts. Deeply informed by the material histories of the media that she employs, Williams plumbs the new meanings that can be created, transforming the ways we see paint, canvas, and frame.

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991) was born in Miami, FL and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Dundee Arts Center, United Kingdom; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Canada, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; and Ceysson & Bénétière, Sainte Etienne, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She received her BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York in 2013.

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