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Sue Williams

American, born 1954

BiographyKnown since the 1980s for her depictions of sexual brutality and emotional cruelty, Sue Williams has has created work that has been described as "the visual equivalent of a conversation with someone who had never learned to censor her speech, someone who would say whatever was on her mind without consideration for her interloculator's sense of propriety, or indeed, for her own image in the eyes of others."

She began her career with cartoony graphic depictions of violations against women, but changed her work in the 1990s to increasingly abstract colorful compositions with busy lines. For a long period, her work was politely disregarded, but following her first exhibition at Gallery 303 in New York in 1992, she received public attention and became a post-feminist icon. The size of her canvases also increased dramatically, and it became obvious she was doing a "revisionist take on Abstract Expressionism." The work has been well received.

Source: Art in America, "Abjection by Other Means," Barry Schwabsky, January 2002.

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