Nicholas Charles Williams
Exhibitions
Dulwich Picture Gallery, LondonWinner of The Hunting Art Prize 2001
The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London is presenting an exhibition of new works by Nicholas Williams. The exhibition will coincide with Frieze week forming part of the Horse Hospital’s year-long programme to mark its 30th year as a vital and progressive venue for art and performance.
The show represents Williams’ first London solo exhibition in over thirty years. It brings together a group of paintings and accompanying sculptures – the physical attributes that inhabit a number of the paintings. The works are a response to a climate of hidden agendas, an opacity of power and the rise of conspiratorial dialogues.
Williams’ studio methodology draws on symbolism and methodologies developed by the Caravaggisti during the early part of the 17th century – of working direct from the model in a darkened studio and using light as a way to navigate through a painting.
Solo shows include the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth; Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro and Liverpool Cathedral for the European Capital of Culture. Public collections include Bournemouth Central Library, Falmouth Art Gallery, Frissiras Museum, Athens and the British Museum.
Literature
Extracts:William Packer, art critic: “Nicholas Charles Williams is one of British Art's well-kept secrets.. even so his reputation is growing fast as both one of the most accomplished figurative artist of his generation, and one of the most unusual. Indeed there is no one else that I can think of who places himself quite so firmly in the great tradition of early Baroque, yet with no sense of anachronism or pastiche.”
Ian Dejardin, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery: "Williams may paint like a modern-day Counter-Reformation artist, but his subject matter is worlds away and unique to him, visually and intellectually gripping."
Brian Sewell, art critic: "The quality of the painting seemed to me astounding".
Mark Bills, Curator of Paintings Prints & Drawings, Museum of London: "An artist who has such a comfortable and informed relationship with the art of the past...he is able to draw on a large number of sources to produce fresh and vibrant images drawn and explored with consummate skill....they emerge from observation and the intimacy of the artist with his subject."
Publications
THE HUNTING ART PRIZE 2001
(Extract from the Catalogue)
Nicholas Charles Williams Born 1961: Studied at Richmond College.
Nicholas Charles Williams is a Realist painter, and, were we to go in for the all too ready and convenient jargon of modern criticism, indeed a Hyper-Realist, given the febrile sharpness and accuracy of his vision. Some might even go further in supposing him to be a Photo- Realist, yet while the camera will always be a legitimate tool, any true scrutiny of Williams’ work reveals simply too much in the way of actual circumstantial information, closely observed, to be gleaned from any camera. Useful as the camera is, it is a tool nevertheless given quite as much to deception and concealment. With Williams the work of the painter is emphatically a matter of hand and eye.
He is a rare artist in his generation, a figurative painter working in somewhat romantic isolation in his Cornish studio, and steeped not just in the imagery and techniques of the Renaissance and the Baroque, but daring the attempt to match them in pictorial scope and ambition. And in taking on their great allegorical and spiritual themes, in spirit at least if not always to the actual letter, he is particularly close to the masters of the early Baroque and the followers of Caravaggio, and especially to Georges de la Tour and perhaps Valentin. He is no less close to them in his technical interests, and if he has engaged in the continuing debate surrounding the use of optical aids by the old masters, in particular in relation to David Hockney’s recent investigations into the likelihood of the matter, it has been rather to demonstrate directly in his own work that the close verisimilitude, that is such a defining and increasingly spectacular characteristic of the later Renaissance and the Baroque, can be quite as well achieved by close, binocular observation and manual, albeit infinitely skilful application. But it was never a question of all or nothing. As both of them would surely agree, there is no substitute for looking with one’s own two eyes. It is a principle that Williams assiduously and most impressively keeps to in everything he does.
Searching III | Oil on canvas | 72 x 72 ins (183 x 183 cm)
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