Gerald Williams USA, b. 1941

Williams’ layered Plexiglas paintings extend his investigation of space, perception, and dimensionality beyond the traditional plane. Built through layers of translucent surfaces, these works generate shifting visual experiences that change with movement, light, and viewing position. The series reflects Williams’ enduring interest in creating images that are simultaneously material and immaterial, physical and metaphysical.

This work concludes the Portraits X, Y, Z series, of which Y and Z, completed in 2007, began as meditations on canvas before expanding into acrylic-on-Plexiglas constructions in Williams’ recent practice. The initial Portraits Y and Z in the series have respectively been shown at major institutional venues including the Met Breuer, AFRICOBRA 50 at Kavi Gupta, Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami.

Across the series of three, Williams extends his portraiture practice into layered, translucent fields where the image is constructed through depth, light, and movement. Within this composition, a mask-like figure pulses to the surface and dissolves in a sky of dots, recalling Williams’ broader engagement with African and Indigenous masking traditions in which the face operates as a site of transformation, mediation, and shifting identity. Here, masking is not literal but perceptual—produced through layering, transparency, and the instability of viewing itself.