Mike Williams

Works of Art: Mike Williams

2008-09-29T18:09:00.013-04:00

Works of art by Mike Williams are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351

Untitled, 2007

Welded steel, 16 x 8 x 8 1/2 in.

$ 725

Untitled, 2002, metal and acrylic

18 x 36 inches, $ 350/SOLD

Biography: Mike Williams

2008-09-28T18:01:00.004-04:00

Mike Williams (b. 1963)

Mike Williams was born in Sumter, S.C., and lives in Columbia, S.C. In 1990, he received a BFA studio degree from the University of South Carolina. Since the late 1980s, Williams has kept up an intense exhibition schedule throughout South Carolina and beyond, including Atlanta, Evanston, Ill., and Tryon, N.C., achieving both critical acclaim and healthy sales. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in the South Carolina State Museum, the Columbia (S.C.) Museum of Art, the Lake County Museum in Chicago, Ill, the Carillon Building in Charlotte, N.C., Sun Trust Plaza in Atlanta, and the Volksbank Gallery in Kaiserslautern, Germany. His public art commissions include large metal sculptures at Midlands Technical College, Governor’s Hill, and Palmetto Health Richland Hospital, all in Columbia, Fulmer Middler School in West Columbia, and Patriot Hall in Sumter. His solo exhibitions include a large 2002-2004 show of outdoors sculpture at the University of South Carolina at Spartanburg.

Photo: Inge Ybema, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Essay: Mike Williams

2008-09-27T18:05:00.000-04:00

MIKE WILLIAMS

by Wim Roefs

2007

While Mike Williams is better known as a painter than sculptor, his output as a sculptor has been substantial. Sculpture also represents the most public part of his art. His sculpture is what people see when they pass his studio, hanging from its front wall or standing on the grounds. Williams also has created for several restaurants enormous metal installations, hanging from the ceiling and consisting mainly of fish and fish-related forms.

In Columbia, S.C., where he lives, Williams has created public sculptures for a local hospital and the Governor’s Hill neighborhood. At the city’s Midlands Technical College Northeast Campus, Williams’ sleek Funnel, topping twenty feet, defines much of the main building’s entrance. In Sumter, where he was born, Evolving Over Time, 14 feet high and almost as wide, holds the central outdoor space of the city’s main cultural facility.

“When I make sculptures, my main interest is to engage real space and the laws of physics by manipulating metal,” Williams said in the catalogue for Up From The Mud, his October 2005 exhibition with Aaron Baldwin at Columbia’s Gallery 80808. Form and content are equally important to him. His forms are mainly derived from nature, always abstracted though often containing literal references, especially to fish.

Williams plans some of the larger public sculptures such as Funnel. Typically, though, he sculpts the way he paints, working his way through the materials toward the discovery of art. He cuts, welds and places pieces of steel, acting and reacting to himself until a piece has achieved aesthetic and conceptual balance.

Williams has done some memorable outdoor sculpture exhibitions. In 2001, at Okra Hill Farm in Sandy Run, S.C., he placed more than a dozen sculptures on the farm’s rolling grounds. The welded-steel sculptures were at once set-off by the landscape and integrated into it. They created at times a surrealist effect. A school of small red fish hovered over a grassy surface. The abstracted, minimal fish form Wrought had its well-defined head low to the ground, and its back half, consisting merely of a bent bar, raised high. It appeared to be either bucking or grazing.

In 2002, the campus of the University of South Carolina at Spartanburg, now USC Upstate, provided a more formal environment. Its central outdoor area is a mixture of paved paths and surfaces and, farther away from the austere buildings, a grass expanse. In the morning, when people went to work, separating the buildings and giving folks something to walk on seemed to be the outdoor space’s only purpose. By the evening, when people went home, Williams had caused a transformation. His dozen-plus sculptures had added texture, definition and depth to the environment, not to mention a good bit of excitement. This was art at work and primary proof that art does work.

Essay: Mike Williams

2008-09-26T18:02:00.000-04:00

Mike Williams

By Wim Roefs

2005

Mike Williams searches for the artwork in the materials he is using while he is using them. His paintings don’t come from studies but from painting. His sculptures might start out with a preconceived notion but they develop as he moves around the metal pieces. “The thing that keeps me interested,” he says, “is how to create something from nothing. It’s a mental activity that’s more fulfilling and humbling than anything I have ever done.”

Thematically, the world processed by this mental activity typically is the outdoors, one of Williams’ passions. Fish, swamps, marshes and landscapes dominate much of his art, as they did his youth in Sumter County, S.C. “There is a tendency in the South,” he says, “to look at what is close to you.”

To these traditional themes, Williams brings a modern, abstracted, spontaneous, fiercely expressionist style. Despite his subject matter, the legacy he taps into is in part that of Abstract Expressionism and European Art Informel and of 1970s and 1980s German and American Neo-Expressionism. But he feels a kinship to a wider variety of artists and art, including Camille Pissarro, Maurice Prendergast, Piet Mondrian’s early tree paintings, landscapes by John Marin, David Hockney and Fairfield Porter, sculpture by David Smith and Mark di Suvero, or Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns. Then there is South Carolina modernist pioneer J. Bardin, who, Williams says, “could do extraordinary things with color.”

“But I don’t do a lot of research outside of trying to understand what I am doing myself. Dealing with day-to-day emotions is a larger part of me as an artist than some love of what is done. The faces I have painted this year are my response to what I have seen people go through on TV recently during disasters. Intuition drives the process. Whatever it is, I smear the paint around to become. The idea rooted in the 1950s and 1960 that you could do what you wanted, that you could take liberties, has really impressed me.” Such liberty allowed for Williams’ novel notion that one could paint with attitude a fish.

Williams paints all-out but deliberately. He is unafraid to apply lots of paint but sufficiently restrained to make his action on flat space do what he wants it to. In a formal sense, his paintings and sculptures are intricate compositions built up from many but fully integrated bits and pieces organized around or alternated with the large, gestured swat. The work is high in energy and bravura.

Williams does not try to render a literal reality. He relates the sensibilities of his environment through the elements that intrigue him. The intrigue includes the way abstract shapes suggest reality and exist in reality itself and that the interaction between them creates movement and energy.

“When I make sculptures, my main interest is to engage real space and the law of physics by manipulating metal. When I paint, my ability to create an interesting surface and make strong, lively, painterly marks that suggest depth and space and emit energy is as important to me as painting a picture. In that sense, form is equally as important to me as content.”

Resume: Mike Williams

2008-09-25T18:07:00.000-04:00

MIKE WILLIAMS -- Resume

EDUCATION

BFA studio degree, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 1990

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

In The Round, Columbia College, Columbia, SC, 2006

Recent Work, The Cheryl Newby Gallery, Pawleys Island, SC, 2006

New Works 2004, The Cheryl Newby Gallery, Pawleys Island, SC, 2004

New Paintings and Sculpture, I. Pinckney Simons Gallery, Beaufort, SC, 2003

Recollection, Newberry College, Newberry, SC, 2003

Conception, outdoors sculpture exhibition, University of South Carolina Spartanburg, Spartanburg, SC, 2002-2004

Translation, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC, 2002

Translation, Interpretation of Pritchards Island, University of South Carolina Beaufort, Beaufort, SC, 2001.

Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, Okra Hill Farm, Sandy Run, SC, 2001

New Paintings and Sculpture, The Jackson Gallery, Aiken, SC, 2000

The Swamp, A Contemplative Space, Sumter Gallery of Art, Sumter, SC, 1998

Recollection, University of South Carolina Beaufort Performing Arts Center, Beaufort, SC, 1997

Mike Williams: New Paintings, Seabury Hall Gallery, Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL, 1996

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Abstract In Nature: Paul Reed, Laura Spong, Katie Walker & Mike Williams, if ART exhibitions, Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, 2007

Nine Exceptional Artists, The Cherly Newby Gallery, Pawleys Island, SC, 2005
Flow, Sun Trust Plaza, Atlanta, 2004-2005

South Carolina Birds: A Fine Arts Exhibition, Sumter Gallery of Art, 2004; Burroughs & Chapin Museum, Myrtle Beach, SC, 2004; City Gallery at Waterfront Park, Charleston, SC, 2006; Pickens County Museum of Art and History, Pickens, SC, 2006

Spring Show, a three-person show, Vinson Gallery, Decatur/Atlanta, GA, 2004

Chesley Williams Wimberly Yaghjian, Winter Exhibition, Vista Studios Gallery 80808, Columbia, SC., 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007

In the Gravel Yard: An Outdoors Sculpture Exhibit, The Art Garage, Columbia, SC, 2002

With/Without Distance, Volksbank gallery, Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2002

Shawn Vinson Fine Art, Decatur/Atlanta, GA, 2001

Turning Wood, Painting Landscapes, Upstairs Gallery, Tryon, NC, 2001

Return to Sender, The Postcard Group, Lake County Museum, Chicago, IL, 2001

Return to Sender, The Postcard Group, South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, SC, 2000

Terrain, Carillon Building Lobby, Charlotte, NC, 1997

What’s for Dinner, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC, 1995

PUBLIC, CORPORATE AND PRIVATE COMMISSIONS

Globe, Hammond School, Columbia, SC, 2006

Funnel, 20.5 feet tall sculpture, stainless steel, Midlands Technical College, Columbia, SC, 2003

Untitled, multi-piece ceiling installation, welded steel, Joe and Amanda Taylor, Debordieu, SC, 2002

No Title, wall sculpture, welded steel, 10’ 6” L x 6’ H, Wim Roefs and Eileen Waddell, Columbia, SC, 2002

Evolving Over Time, welded steel sculpture, 14’ H x 13’ L, at Patriot’s Hall, Sumter, SC, commission from the Sumter Cultural Commission, 2001

Space & Time, mural, project with students, Fulmer Middle School,West Columbia, SC 2001

St. Francis Processional Cross, welded steel cross, 88" H x 14" L x 2" D,
commissioned by and located at St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church, Chapin, SC, 2001

An Evolutionary Symbol, welded steel sculpture, 14’ H x 8’ diameter, The Palmetto Steel Project, exhibited temporarily at Boyd Plaza, Columbia Museum of Art Columbia, SC, sponsored by the Cultural Council of Richland & Lexington Counties, Columbia, SC 2000

Variations on Scale, mixed media and welded steel, installation, LaVecchia’s Restaurant, Lake Norman, NC, 2000

More Subjects, mixed media and welded steel, installation, LaVecchia’s Restaurant, Charlotte, NC, 1999

Subjects, installation of enamel on glass murals and mixed media and welded steel sculptures, Aqua Grill Restaurant, Columbia, SC, 1998

Instrument, painted, welded steel, 8’ H x 5’ L, Governor’s Hill, Columbia, SC, commission from the Cultural Council for Richland & Lexington Counties for Rich’s, given to Columbia Housing Authority, 1997

Rotation, Relief from Rotation and Illusion in Perspective, steel sculpture and mixed media works, respectively 7’ H x 5’ Diameter, 34” L x 24” H x 4” D, and 6’ Square, commissioned by Richland Memorial Hospital Foundation for RMH Children’s Emergency Lobby, Columbia, SC, 1996.

Artist's Statement: Mike Williams

2008-09-24T13:52:00.000-04:00

“All of my work - paintings, drawings and sculpture - is inspired by my experiences with nature and the environment. My landscape paintings evoke and preserve a sense of place through ever shifting, poetic interpretations and formal explorations of paint. My fish paintings and sculptures serve more as figments of my imagination, my experiences as a fisherman, and my capabilities as an artist. My goal is to go far beyond mere representation.”

Kleinformat/Small Format: October 26- November 12, 2007

2007-11-08T18:44:00.000-05:00

(To enlarge, click on image above.)

Kleinformat/Small Format: The Columbia - Kaiserslautern Exchange is currently showing at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street. This exhibition runs from Friday, October 26 until Tuesday, November 13, 2007 and included an opening reception on Friday, October 26 from 5 - 10 PM. Additional hours are: Weekdays from 11 AM until 7 PM and Saturdays from 11 AM until 5 PM. The exhibit features work by five South Carolinians (Mary Gilkerson, H. Brown Thornton, Stephen Chesley, Mike Williams, and Tonya Gregg) and five Germans from Columbia's sister city, Kaiserslautern (Silvia Rudolf, Roland Albert, Reiner Mahrlein, Ralph Gelbert and Klaus Hartmann).

Abstract in Nature: February 9-20, 2007

2007-01-26T18:23:00.000-05:00

if ART, International Fine Art Services

presents at

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, 808 Lady St., Columbia, S.C.

A b s t r a c t I n N a t u r e:

Featuring

Washington Color Field Great

PAUL REED

and

South Carolina’s

LAURA SPONG

KATIE WALKER

MIKE WILLIAMS

Feb. 9 – 20, 2007

Artists’ Reception:

Friday, Feb. 9, 5 – 10 p.m.

Opening Hours:

Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sundays, 1 – 5 p.m.

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

and by appointment

Contact Wim Roefs at if ART:(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

For its February exhibition at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in Columbia, S.C., if ART, International Fine Art Services, presents Abstract In Nature, a group exhibition with work by South Carolina artists Laura Spong, Mike Williams and Katie Walker as well as renowned first-generation Washington Color Field painter Paul Reed. The show consists of abstract paintings by Reed, Spong and Walker and abstract metal sculpture by Williams. The exhibition opens Friday, Feb. 9, with a reception from 5:00 –10:00 p.m. and runs through Feb. 20. Opening hours are weekdays, 11:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m., Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and Sundays 1:00 ¬ – 5:00 p.m. Reed, Spong and Walker are represented by Columbia’s if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St., (803) 238-2351, which also shows sculpture by Williams.

Washington, D.C., native Paul Reed, (b. 1919) in 1965-1966 was one of the six painters in The Washington Color Painters, the first nationally traveling exhibition of Washington Color Field paintings. The other five painters were Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring and Tom Downey. Reed’s work is in dozens of museums across the country, including the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Museum of American Art, all in D.C., the Detroit Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum in Hartford, Conn., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. In South Carolina, his work is in the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Columbia Museum of Art, whose acquisition of two Paul Reed paintings was facilitated by if ART owner Wim Roefs. Reed’s work has been in more than 100 solo and group shows, including Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which traveled nationally from 2000-2002.

Columbia’s Laura Spong (b. 1926) enjoyed her most successful year in 2006, both in terms of sales and critical acclaim. Spong sold more than 30 paintings from her 80th birthday solo exhibition at Gallery 80808 in February 2006, which was accompanied by a 32-page catalogue published by if ART. Spong also had solo exhibitions last year at Carol Saunders Gallery in Columbia and Greenville’s Hampton III Gallery, as well as a retrospective at the University of South Carolina’s McMaster Gallery. She was in a two-person show at Atlanta’s Vinson Gallery and in several group exhibitions in North and South Carolina. In April, she’ll be in a group exhibition at the Greenville County Museum of Art that also will include if ART Gallery artist David Yaghjian.

Greenville’s Katie Walker (b. 1970) was in the 2005 Florence, Italy, Biennale, and recently has been in exhibitions at the Upstairs Gallery in Tryon, N.C., Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta, the Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art, the Carillon Building in Charlotte, N.C., the Artbomb in Greenville and Brookgreen Gardens in Pawley’s Island, S.C. She was included in New American Paintings No. 40, 2002. Walker holds a BFA in Studio Art from Furman University and an MFA from the University of Georgia.

Sumter native and Columbia resident Mike Williams (b. 1963) recently had a major solo exhibition at Columbia College in Columbia, S.C. Williams is among the state’s most-acclaimed painters and sculptors. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions at Pawleys Island Cheryl Newby Gallery, I. Pinckney Simons Gallery in Beaufort, S.C., and at Newberry College in Newberry, S.C, Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C., and the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg, S.C.

SOLD WORKS OF ART

2005-10-02T14:13:00.005-04:00

Working Man II, 2007

Welded Steel

28 x 10 x 10 in.

$ 850

Combine 87, 2004, mixed media, 45 x 32 ½ in.

$ 1,800

Aaron Baldwin & Mike Williams: Up From the Mud: October 7-19, 2005

2005-09-25T18:06:00.000-04:00

If ART

International Fine Art Services

2300 Lee St.

Columbia, SC 29205

(803) 799-7170 / (803) 238-2351

wroefs@sc.rr.com

if ART

presents

UP FROM THE MUD:

AARON BALDWIN & MIKE WILLIAMS

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady St

Columbia, SC

October 7 – 19, 2005

Artists’ reception: Friday, Oct. 7, 5:00 ¬– 10:00 p.m.

Opening Hours:

Saturdays: 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Sundays: 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Weekdays: 3:30 – 7:00 p.m. & by appointment

If ART, International Fine Art Services, presents Up From The Mud, an exhibition of paintings, three-dimensional wall pieces and sculptures by Aaron Baldwin and Mike Williams. The exhibition is at Gallery 80808 at Vista Studios, 808 Lady St, Columbia, SC, October 7 – 19, 2005. The artists’ reception is Friday, October 7, 5:00 ¬– 10:00 p.m. Opening hours are Saturdays, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.; Sundays, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m; and weekdays 3:30 – 7:00 p.m. or by appointment.

The artists will present a mixture of new work and older pieces not previously shown in the Columbia area. Baldwin’s work will include wooden sculptures and three-dimensional oil paintings on board with wooden relief elements. Williams will not just show the abstracted swamp and fish paintings he’s known for. Much of his contribution will consist of works on the margins of his artistic production, including metal wall assemblages, formalist metal sculptures, and even energetic, highly expressionist, painted portraits.

Both Baldwin and Williams are deeply influenced by the natural environment, the water and dirt of their childhood. Baldwin (b. 1966) was born and raised in coastal McClellanville, SC, with the ocean and marshes nearby. After some time away living in Clemson, SC., and Charlotte, NC, Baldwin in the 1990s moved back to his hometown. Williams (b. 1963) was born and raised in Sumter, SC, near the swamps and lakes of Sumter and Clarendon counties. He lives in Columbia, SC, and is still an avid outdoorsman.

Literal elements from the environment the artists hold dear are easily identifiable in their work. Baldwin, for instance, incorporates boat shapes or reduces bird forms to their abstracted essence. In Williams’s paintings and sculptures fish and fish forms play prominent roles.

Still, while their backgrounds and personal preferences inform their subject matter, both Baldwin and Williams more often lean toward sensibilities they associate with the environment they grew up and live in. The work is about how they personally relate to that environment, about the existential, even spiritual component of the physical world. Esthetically, that translates not into literal depictions but compositions with strong formal qualities, built from abstracted forms that can be traced back to nature.

“In that sense, Baldwin and Williams have a lot in common,” says Wim Roefs, if ART’s director. “They share a certain sensibility. At the same time, their work looks very different. Baldwin’s three-dimensional work, usually in wood, relates to the cool, reductive, understated stylings of Constantin Brancusi or, more recently, Martin Puryear. Williams, especially in his paintings, takes his cues more from Abstract Expressionism’s legacy, although his metal sculptures at times take austere, clean forms.”

If ART of Columbia, SC, represents artists, organizes art exhibitions, and provides curatorial services to galleries, museums, and other institutions. If ART also provides consultation services to fine art institutions, individual artists and art collectors. If ART was founded early in 2005 by Roefs, the company’s director and curator. Recent if ART exhibitions include “Janet Orselli – Matt Overend: Double O 80808,” in April, at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, Columbia, SC, and “Carl Blair: The Verner Award Celebration Exhibition,” April-May 2005 at Lewis & Clark Gallery, Columbia, SC.