Pace Prints to Present Night Shift a Solo Exhibition of New Works by Robin F. Williams Opening May 2, 2025.
Pace Prints is pleased to present Night Shift, a solo exhibition of new monoprints and collages by Robin F. Williams, on view from May 2–May 31, 2025, at 536 West 22nd Street. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, May 1 from 6-8pm.
The artist’s second solo exhibition with Pace Prints, this new body of work adopts the compositional and narrative vocabulary of b-movie horror films, which have become a central touchpoint in the artist’s paintings over the last several years. From vampire and slasher flicks to supernatural and psychological thrillers, these source materials feature the fear, pain, and desire of female protagonists, while leaning heavily into repetitious genre conventions, to invite the viewer into a curated emotional landscape.
For Williams, these expressions of extreme emotion, commonly feminized within the horror genre, become the means through which to examine universal human experiences across gender like catharsis for grief, feelings of vulnerability, as well as internal and external transformation.
Known for their boundary pushing approach to figurative painting, which utilizes graphic and illusionistic techniques alongside innovative mark-making, Williams delved into the technical and material potential of printmaking when creating the works for this show. To complement their fastidiously hand rendered subjects, the artist took on a more playful and improvisational approach in the printshop - collecting and layering imagery, while also introducing graphic elements.
Monoprints like Split, Pierced, and Risen exemplify this remixing of visual elements by superimposing female portraits with familiar horror-related motifs that suggest the interplay of internal feeling and external forces. The reoccurring visuals between these works create an implied dialogue that carries an uncanny undercurrent throughout the entire exhibition.
Expanding the material dialogue between works, Williams also incorporated the by-products of the printmaking process - reusing discarded materials and test prints to create their first collages. Works like Firestarter, Expulsion, and Unified Field find the artist leaning into the immediacy of the technique to create supernatural space within these works that suggest an emotional realm beyond the confines of the body.
Night Shift presents the artist’s first series of non-figurative pieces created with Pace Prints: Tarot Blossoms. This series of monoprints capture the moiré effect experienced when taking a photo of a film on a TV screen, which is where William’s works often begin. The distortions and aesthetic quirks of film and photography can be found throughout the prints in the show, from the psychedelic swirls of the Tarot Blossoms to the shattered color planes of the Shutter, Shock, and Awe series.
Complimenting the subject matter of the show, Williams also riffs on the physical ephemera associated with horror movies to compile the show’s storylines into what they have referred to as a form of fan fiction. The show’s eponymous work Night Shift serves as an imagined marketing poster for the show, enticing visitors to step into the gallery and into the artist’s bent, broken, and thrilling cinematic world.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a printed Night Shift movie poster that will be free for visitors to take while supplies last.