Didier William: Art Basel Unlimited

Booth #U58

Didier William (b.1983, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a US-based mixed-media painter. His work focuses on constructions of blackness that include the nuances of diasporic identity, and his own experiences of immigrating to the United States from Haiti. William’s paintings undermine traditional aesthetic, racial, and gendered dichotomies in order to reimagine the personal and collective histories, where they may intersect with personal narratives, and what those intersections might yield. While his paintings contain elements of abstraction and figuration, they incorporate traditions from oil painting, acrylic, collage, wood carving, and printmaking to comment on intersections of identity and culture. William’s interdisciplinary approach to painting evidences the many layers of meaning in each of his works that often bear titles of proverbs and testimonies in his native language of Haitian Kreyol. Androgynous human figures with carved eyes confront his audience and insist on materializing the circuitry of the gaze. In addition, the relationship of spaces is central to William’s thinking. In his paintings he continuously develops formal figurative elements that morph into topographic terrains that reveal secondary and tertiary domains. William’s work affirms a space of multiplicity that dismantles the normative power of the gaze to inscribe gender and racialize bodies. In this way he unapologetically reclaims autonomy over a fragmented record of history, engaging his personal connection to the complexity of immigrant narratives to create opportunity for investigation and redemption. His work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and London, and has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.