Christopher Williams

Exhibition
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

29 April – 21 June 2015

☆☆☆☆ London Evening Standard
‘A peculiar environment awaits you: one in which almost nothing can be taken for granted’ – The Guardian

A finger poised on a camera – its open back revealing the film roll and mechanism – sets the scene for this exhibition of photographs about photography. Somewhere between a film director, a picture editor and an art historian, American artist Christopher Williams (b.1956) investigates photography as the defining medium of modernism.

Williams’ exquisite prints reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography. Often working with set designers, models and technicians, Williams’ technically precise pictures recall Cold War era imagery and 1960s advertising, as well as invoking histories of art, photography and cinema. His photographs are elements at play in a larger system including architecture, exhibition design, books, posters, videos, vitrines and signage that investigates the stage sets of the art world and the publicity structures on which they rely.

From his renowned 1989 studies of botanical specimens, Angola to Vietnam, to the hyper-real, colour saturated studies of kitchenware made in 2014, this first survey of Williams’ work in the UK immerses us in visually enthralling and politically resonant lines of enquiry.

The Production Line of Happiness: Christopher Williams is generously supported by:

The Artworkers Retirement Society
Ringer Collection Zurich
Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte
Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
David Zwirner, New York/London
Funded by KunststiftungNRW

Curator's Tour: The Production Line of Happiness

Guest curator Mark Godfrey (Curator, Tate Modern) gives a tour of the Christopher Williams exhibition.

Exhibition Catalogue

Accompanying the first survey of Christopher Williams’s work in the UK, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue.