Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Robin F. Williams paints women who refuse to be passively looked at, and this refusal may be the most radical artistic act of her generation. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1984 and based in Brooklyn, this artist has been developing for nearly two decades a body of work that continually questions, provokes, and overturns our expectations regarding female representation in contemporary art.
Williams works primarily in oil, but her technical arsenal also includes the airbrush, stenciling, poured paint, and various marbling techniques that give her monumental canvases a complex and layered texture. Her female figures, rendered at life-size or larger, possess this troubling quality of observing us back, creating a reversed power dynamic that unsettles the viewer accustomed to a one-sided contemplation.
Williams’s visual universe draws deliberately eclectic sources: social networks, American folklore, historical portraiture, vintage advertisements, and more recently, B-movie horror cinema. This last obsession deserves focus, as it reveals the conceptual depth of her approach and her strategic intelligence in addressing the patriarchal conventions of the gaze.
Horror cinema, particularly the slasher sub-genre (serial killer films) of the 1970s and 1980s, occupies a central place in Williams’s recent exhibitions: Watch Yourself (2023) in Mexico City, Undying (2024) in Tokyo, and Good Mourning (2024) in New York. These films, often dismissed by institutional critics and relegated to the status of lowbrow entertainment, function according to Williams as raw archives of our collective fears and repressed desires. In a conversation with BOMB magazine, she states: “We live vicariously through these feminized emotions, which are nonetheless human emotions. For me, it’s about accessing the full range of emotions that we’ve decided to reserve for certain genres depending on the circumstances” [1].
This appropriation of horror cinema goes far beyond a referential or nostalgic exercise. Williams identifies in these films a recurring narrative structure where the woman serves as an emotional vehicle, a suffering body meant to generate a visceral reaction in the viewer. The figures of Carrie covered in pig’s blood, Sally Hardesty escaping in the van, or the teenagers from The Slumber Party Massacre become under her brush narrative agents endowed with their own consciousness and capacity for retaliation.
The painting Slumber Party Martyrs (2023) perfectly illustrates this strategy of reappropriation. Williams transposes the composition of Saint Sebastian tended by Irene by Georges de La Tour, establishing a bold parallel between the suffering of Christian martyrs and that of serial killer victims. This temporal and cultural superimposition suggests that the religious ecstasy represented in European museums and the female hysteria exploited by Hollywood stem from the same mechanism of instrumentalization of the female body. The screen distortions that Williams integrates into some compositions of this series constantly remind the viewer of the technological mediation through which we consume these images of women.
Williams’s pictorial treatment of these horrific scenes favors emotional ambiguity over pure terror. Her protagonists sometimes display a sly smile, an expression of boredom, or a knowing look that contradicts the dramatic situation in which they find themselves. This dissonance between the expected iconography of the genre and the real affect of the figures creates a productive discomfort, forcing the viewer to reconsider their own expectations and projections.
The reference to folklore and cultural archetypes also runs through this horror body of work. Williams compares serial killer films to constantly reinterpreted folktales, where genre codes are transmitted and transformed from film to film, creating a collective mythology of gendered fear. This folkloric dimension explains why her paintings retain a strong narrative quality despite their sophisticated formal treatment.
The use of moiré, that distortion effect that appears when photographing a screen with a smartphone, becomes for Williams a visual metaphor for the multiple media filters through which we perceive femininity. These optical interferences remind us that we never see women directly, but always through layers of culturally constructed representations. Horror cinema, in its brutal frankness and extreme codification, makes these mechanisms visible and therefore open to critique.
The canvases arising from this cinematographic exploration also show an interest in color as an agent of distancing. Williams cites Joan Semmel, a feminist painter who depicted sexual scenes with deliberately artificial chromatic choices to counter the automatic eroticization of female bodies. Williams applies a similar strategy, saturating her compositions with electric pinks, digital blues, and toxic oranges that prevent any naturalizing reading of the depicted violence.
The other conceptual pillar of Williams’s work lies in her constant dialogue with art history, particularly the tradition of Western figurative painting and its conventions regarding the female nude. Here, a tutelary figure emerges with remarkable insistence: Édouard Manet and his Olympia (1863), a painting that Williams considers a foundational text for her own practice.
In several interviews, Williams recounts her regular pilgrimage before Olympia at the Musée d’Orsay, describing the intense emotion evoked by the direct and defiant gaze of the prostitute painted by Manet [2]. This painting, scandalous when presented at the Paris Salon in 1865, disturbs precisely because it refuses the codes of passivity and idealization that had characterized the representation of the female nude until then. Olympia does not play at being a mythological goddess like the Venuses of Titian or Cabanel; she looks at the viewer with an acute awareness of her presence and intentions.
Williams identifies in this direct gaze a strategy of resistance that she systematizes and radicalizes in her own painting. Her figures all possess this troubling quality of self-awareness that Manet introduced into the history of modern art. As she explains: “I like to think that the figures in my works possess a form of self-awareness, and it is a way for me to play with the power dynamic between the viewer and the figure in the painting” [3].
This self-awareness of the painted figures poses a dizzying philosophical question that Williams formulates with disarming candor: do her paintings possess a form of consciousness? Intellectually, we know that they are pigments on canvas, two-dimensional illusions. Yet, the phenomenological experience in front of certain works by Williams suggests a presence, an agency that exceeds their status as inanimate objects.
This questioning of the ontological status of the painted image fits into a precise artistic genealogy. Manet, but also George de La Tour with his candlelit saints, George Tooker with his isolated figures in bureaucratic spaces, all these painters that Williams cites as influences share a particular attention to the quality of the gaze and to the involvement of the spectator in the depicted scene.
Manet’s hand on Olympia’s sex, that flat and almost batrachian hand that Williams specifically mentions, signals the labor, the commercial transaction, the materiality of the prostituted body. Williams transposes this frankness into her own compositions, systematically refusing consoling aestheticization. Her nudes are never graceful in the academic sense; they display a frontal corporeality, sometimes aggressive, that rejects voyeuristic complacency.
The exhibition Your Good Taste Is Showing (2017) already explored this tension between commercialized femininity and subjective resistance. Williams presented women in poses from fashion magazine advertisements, but with facial expressions that contradicted the expected submission. The title itself functions as an ironic provocation: good taste, that bourgeois notion of aesthetic decency, is precisely what Williams refuses to respect.
Former New York Times art critic Roberta Smith perfectly grasped this subversive dimension by writing that Williams’s paintings “target the impossible idealizations of women in art as well as in advertising, depicting androgynous supermodels, mostly nude and inaccessible” [4]. This formulation captures the productive ambivalence of the work: simultaneously seductive and repellent, aesthetically sophisticated and conceptually corrosive.
The pictorial technique itself becomes for Williams a site of resistance against cultural hierarchies. Her use of the airbrush, stencils, metal chains to create textural effects evokes YouTube and TikTok tutorials, that universe of amateur and democratized painting that the art institution disdains. Williams explicitly claims this lineage with “crafty” culture, that English term which simultaneously denotes manual skill, female domesticity, and strategic cunning.
By incorporating these techniques considered lowbrow into monumental compositions intended for international galleries and museum collections, Williams performs a symbolic inversion of artistic values. She dismantles the myth of the solitary genius, that romantic and intrinsically masculine figure that still dominates the imagination of contemporary art. Her painting proclaims that one can be technically virtuous while rejecting the patriarchal seriousness of grand painting.
The recent series incorporating the virtual assistants Siri and Alexa into the bodies of Hollywood actresses perhaps represents the logical culmination of this reflection on consciousness, representation, and agency. Williams imagines these feminized artificial intelligences as prisoners trying to escape their technological operating systems. Siri Calls For Help, inspired by a scene from Rosemary’s Baby where Mia Farrow calls from a phone booth, visualizes the Kafkaesque absurdity of a digital assistant that would need help but could not use the phone she inhabits to call for it.
These works project into the near future the questions Manet was already asking in the nineteenth century: who watches whom? Who holds power in the visual exchange? What form of subjectivity can emerge from a body that is constantly objectified, mediated, and instrumentalized? Williams does not offer comforting answers, but her paintings keep these questions open with an urgency that has lost none of its relevance.
The scope of Williams’ work, her conceptual coherence despite stylistic evolutions, and her ability to weave together high and low culture, historical references and contemporary concerns, make her an essential voice in current American painting. Her work demonstrates that figuration, far from being exhausted or reactionary, remains a fertile ground for critical exploration of power structures and conventions of representation.
Williams’ first solo museum exhibition, We’ve Been Expecting You, presented at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2024, offered an overview of seventeen years of production. The title itself, with its slightly threatening tone and its implication of the visitor, perfectly summarizes the artist’s approach: these figures were expecting us, they knew we would come to look, and they are ready to return our gaze with an intensity that unsettles our certainties.
Williams’ work reminds us that painting remains a living medium, capable of posing complex philosophical questions while offering the sensual pleasure of color, texture, and form. It proves that one can simultaneously be a technical virtuoso and a rigorous theorist, an heir to the great pictorial tradition and a radical iconoclast. In a world saturated with ephemeral digital images, her monumental canvases assert the stubborn persistence of the human gaze and the possibility of a representation that refuses objectification. This is why her work matters, this is why it demands attention now. These painted women will not disappear, they will not look away, they will not facilitate our visual comfort. They are here to stay, and it is we who will have to learn to bear their gaze.
- London, Michael. “Robin F. Williams by Michael London”, BOMB Magazine, August 12, 2024.
- Indrisek, Scott. “Robin F. Williams Revels in the Craft of Painting”, Artsy, March 27, 2020.
- Cepeda, Gaby. “Robin F. Williams”, Artforum, June 2023.
- Smith, Roberta. Quote appearing in the Wikipedia article “Robin F. Williams”, accessed in October 2025.
