ADAA Fair 2026

Brittney Leeanne Williams
The Body Is an Eye, 2025
oil on canvas
48 x 38 in. (121.9 x 96.5 cm.)

Speaking about her work in this exhibition, the artist stated:

My work explores the body as a site of transcendence, memorialization, suffering, and as a liminal device to the mystical. While my paintings are often figurative, my concerns are conceptual as I grapple with the articulation of the body as both subject and object, engaging ideas of presence and absence. In addition, the body, natural world and architecture often blend and reflect each other in my work. I use the color red–symbolic of a signal–to speak to the Black experience, frequently centering a red Black body as the starting place for a painting.

This exhibition represents two strands in my current work. First, I draw on biblical genre paintings of angelic visitation and revelation. In reimagining these tableaux, I often redact the angel or other biblical figure while emphasizing the materiality of drapery as a trace of their presence. Rather than the revelator appearing in human form, the angelic figure is absent, only suggested by their vacated robes. They are stripped of a figure yet are still present. One of these paintings continues my Interruption series, which riffs on neo-classical figurations of statuary and drapery. The interruption depicted in this canvas operates on the level of the picture plane and thematically, as the figures are disrupted by unseen revelations. The drapes in this image complicate the relationship between the figure and ground, foreground and background.

In addition, some of the works in this exhibition operate like talismans or icons. I think of these paintings as aspiring to the power that Simon Critchley ascribes to medieval Christian symbols: “Devotional objects and images impel the attentive viewer to both see the literal thing in front of them and to see beyond. To see both at once.” (Simon Critchley, Mysticism). Again, drapery floats, suggesting an unseen form. The image of the eye that occasionally appears here, sometimes projecting out from a praying form, sometimes framing a ritual token, is a gesture of seeing while being seen. The occasional submissive yet entreating body becomes the source of vision. Activating these eyes evokes being witnessed by the art object, thus evoking the feeling that they themselves see.

Brittney Leeanne Williams
Interruption 8: Integration, 2025
oil on canvas
60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm.)

Press

Observer’s Top Five Pieces Not to Miss at the 2025 Armory Show

OBSERVER

Red is a difficult color. Beloved by collectors of the more thuggish variety, many painters avoid it because it’s too dominant. Brittney Leeanne Williams doesn’t fight the red’s power, opting to mitigate it with trompe l’oeil. Her folds are so realistic that when you first approach it, you don’t even think of it as surreal. You see the rocks, the clothes and the reflections, and your brain registers this life-sized silhouette as a person. This is a dramatic and cinematic work without any faces in it. It’s suggestive of the cover of a romance novel from the 1990s, or perhaps a stained glass window. The robe does seem like something Jesus would wear, and the light source does seem to suggest that it’s coming from the non-existent head. It’s appealing how dark and shiny this work becomes near the bottom. It seems to suggest that this work could be many different ways, if it wanted to be.