Kelli Williams: “Tooth and Nail”
“February 23rd through March 24th
opening Friday February 23rd from 6-8pm

All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home:
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

-W.H. Auden

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Kelli Williams entitled “Tooth and Nail.” For this much-anticipated debut, Kelli Williams has produced a series of modestly-scaled works that exude Boschian excess and complexity. In them, gentle and comforting hues belie the debauchery and profanity of the compositions.

In her works, Ms. Williams attempts to create a kind of master narrative, so overheated and unstable that It collapses upon and subverts itself, achieving a kind of cathartic release. In keeping with the tightly wound compositions, a fetishistic and obsessive attention to detail is evidenced. The paintings include multiple figures painted on a chalk gesso ground with detailed drawings underneath. Because of the complexity of both the materials and the methodology, the works take an extraordinary amount of time to complete. This show is the culmination of 2 years of work.

Kelli Williams’ work is, in her own words, influenced by kitsch and pornography. However, she is not interested in kitsch in a nostalgic sense but rather has an admiration for the way the genre depicts death, horror and the sublime in messy, uncontrolled and unironic ways. There is an affinity in thinking in Ms. Williams work, with cultural theorists such as Laura Kipnis who argues that the disgust exhibited by many feminists towards porn springs from a history of bourgeois desire to remove the distasteful from the sight of society, which links to a denial of the body, its orifices and desires. A cultural and anthropological interest in the genre is also evident, particularly with reference to ancient, quasi-religious beliefs about obscenity as a protection against death or the malice of others. In Ms. Williams imagination, these works act as talismans against the ugliness of the world, by instigating a subversive, rather than romantic form of escapism.

Kelli Williams has an MFA from Yale University. She has participated in The Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational exhibition last year in New York City, and “Through the Looking Glass” at Galerie Bob van Orsouw in Zurich, Switzerland. This is her first solo exhibition.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6pm. For further information or visuals, please contact Elizabeth Balogh or Nicole Russo.