Los Angeles-based artist Kent Williams (born 1962) has built up a formidable reputation as a leading contemporary figurative painter, alongside his thriving career as a creator of graphic novels. Williams´ strong, gestural realism, combined with areas of arresting detail, exhibits abstract and neo-expressionistic sensibilities, as well as autobiographical elements: favorite models, friends, and the artist himself all play a role in the human story of his paintings. This new monograph presents recent paintings completed between 2007 and 2011. As critic Peter Frank explains in one of the catalogue essays, Williams´ unlikely, often dreamlike naturalism, faithful to appearances but not at all to reality--a kind of supernaturalism--relies on an entirely confident and convincing kind of figure painting, one that acknowledges but does not honor the verities of the body.
