Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams studied at Grinnell College. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are Rotterdam. Employment is recorded with Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Work by Christopher Williams is recorded in the collections of Tate, Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Photography Collection and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

Williams was born in 1956 in Los Angeles, California. His father worked in Hollywood as a special effects artist. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts where he received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. under the first generation of West Coast conceptual artists including John Baldessari, Michael Asher, and Douglas Huebler.

Writing in Artforum in 2007, art critic Tim Griffin described Williams's approach as sociophotographic but more generally can be described as a political and historical practice. It has been said that Williams works within the tradition of institutional critique within what Sven Lütticken describes as an informal group, along with Willem de Rooij, Jeroen de Rijke and Mathias Poledna, that investigates the "parameters of the exhibition space." Chronologically, however, he belongs to The Pictures Generation. In 1982 Williams had his first solo exhibition at Jancar Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles. Angola to Vietnam is a photography portfolio of glass flowers. In 2000, at an exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery, in New York, Williams showed twenty photographs including a series of pictures of a 1964 Renault automobile on its side. Writing in The New York Times, Ken Johnson said, "the Renault was made in a French factory where significant revolutionary activities took place in 1968; hence it is tipped up like a barricade." Williams' photographs oftentimes show increasingly obsolescent film-based equipment—cameras, lenses and darkroom gear—as beautiful and precise as catalog product shots. The accompanying text adds detail about how the equipment was used. Made by a professional photographer who follows Williams's directions, the conventionally scaled pictures have the glossy lucidity of commercial photographs.

Since October 2008 he has been a professor in photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Williams' wife Ann Goldstein is curator and deputy director and chair of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

• 2005: Secession, Vienna • 2005: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany • 2006: Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal • 2007: Kunsthalle Zürich • 2010: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany • 2010: Bergen Kunsthall, Norway • 2011: Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany • 2011: Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium • 2013: Christopher Williams: For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 18), David Zwirner, London • 2014 at The Art Institute of Chicago and traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York • 2020: Christopher Williams Model: Kochgeschirre, Kinder, Viet Nam (Angepasst zum Benutzen), C/O Berlin, Berlin • 2024: Christopher Williams: Radio/Rauhfaser/Television, Neubauer Collegium, Chicago • 2025: Christopher Williams: Blocking Templates, Fahrbereitschaft, Haubrok Foundation, Berlin • 2025: Christopher Williams: Hand Painted Signs, Photographs, Long Play Vinyl, Audiophile Bar, Printed Matter, The Perimeter, London

• 2013: 55th Venice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni

The following is established of the heading itself.