Christopher Williams: For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 4)

Opening on January 11, 2006, David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Williams. This will be the artist's third solo exhibition at the gallery. Williams' work has been exhibited this past year at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany; and currently at the SECESSION, Vienna, Austria. He has been selected to participate in the upcoming Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, and solo shows at Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy and the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal are slated for 2006.

Christopher Williams' work operates within the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and, ultimately (perhaps cumulatively), the history of Modernism. In photography, film, performance, sculpture, graphic design, and video, the process of reproduction is the artist's point of entry; from there he exposes the flaws in a near-perfect, carefully constructed reality. Each image, whether architectural or figurative, natural or manufactured, is subject to the conditions of production and the inevitable boundaries of the pictorial surface. Helmut Drexler states, "By systematically building such provocative moments into his work, Christopher Williams to an extent kick-starts the process of perception and reception and at least points it in a certain direction. This approach, which oscillates between the work itself and the process of producing it, can now also be related to the genealogy of his own artistic methods, both in relation to and in contradistinction from Rephotography and Conceptual Art."

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