Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich/Paris is pleased to announce the representation of US-based Haitian artist Didier William in collaboration with James Fuentes Gallery, New York & Los Angeles.
The first solo exhibition with the artist at the gallery in Zurich will be in June 2024.
Didier William (b.1983, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a US-based mixed-media painter. His work focuses on constructions of blackness that include the nuances of diasporic identity, and his own experiences of immigrating to the United States from Haiti. William’s paintings undermine traditional aesthetic, racial, and gendered dichotomies in order to reimagine the personal and collective histories, where they may intersect with personal narratives, and what those intersections might yield.
While his paintings contain elements of abstraction and figuration, they incorporate traditions from oil painting, acrylic, collage, wood carving, and printmaking to comment on intersections of identity and culture. William’s interdisciplinary approach to painting evidences the many layers of meaning in each of his works that often bear titles of proverbs and testimonies in his native language of Haitian Kreyol. Androgynous human figures with carved eyes confront his audience and insist on materializing the circuitry of the gaze. William’s work affirms a space of multiplicity that dismantles the normative power of the gaze to inscribe gender and racialize bodies.
The large mixed-media painting Death Is Never Forever, 2023, by Didier William will be shown at our booth at Art Basel, Hall 2.1, booth J10.
Didier William, born in 1983 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is an accomplished artist. He obtained a BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, School of Art. Currently, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami is hosting a career survey exhibition dedicated to William's work. His art has been showcased in various prestigious institutions such as the Figge Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, among others.
William has been honored with notable awards, including the 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant, the 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grant, and the 2018 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also served as an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, and has shared his knowledge and expertise by teaching at renowned institutions such as Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, UPenn, and SUNY Purchase. Currently, he holds the position of Assistant Professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
William's artwork has been acquired for the permanent collections of notable institutions, including MOCA North Miami, ICA Miami, Carnegie Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Figge Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and JPMorgan Chase Art Collection. Philadelphia is the city where William resides and creates his art.
