• Art Basel’s Unlimited sector is dedicated to large-scale works that go beyond the limits of a traditional booth, and Didier William’s Gesture to Home fits this context in a natural and powerful way: the scale of the paintings, the physicality of the sculptural elements, and the way the work activates the space around it all speak directly to what Unlimited was created to support.
     
    In this series, William views the Gulf South’s bald cypress trees as witnesses of history, given their ability to live for over a thousand years. These ancient trees, some predating European colonization, have witnessed cataclysmic disasters and human impact, from the transatlantic slave trade to the Louisiana Purchase and the evolving regional landscape.

    “Most cypress trees will remain tall and straight even when they appear to be hanging on by mere threads.”
    — Didier William

  • Gesture to Home, first presented at Prospect.6 in New Orleans, is a large-scale installation that merges painting, sculpture, and spatial design into a unified environment. Central to the work are a series of towering paintings of bald cypress trees—a species native to Louisiana, where the project originated. William doesn’t depict these trees simply as elements of the landscape; instead, they serve as active, symbolic figures. Their forms evoke postures and gestures that mirror the human body in motion or engaged in ritual.

     

    The installation features monumental figures emerging from the trunks of these trees, each adorned with carved eyes that gaze outward in all directions. Surrounding these figures are monumental paintings of trees, with branches extending beyond the picture plane. Together, the sculptures and paintings invert the traditional dynamic, transforming humans—typically nature's observers—into the ones being observed.

     

    William, who immigrated with his family from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Miami at the age of six, explores in his work constructions of Blackness, emphasizing the nuances of diasporic identity and his own lived experiences.


  • Didier William Gesture to Home (detail), 2024 Acrylic on panel 269.2 x 162.6 cm (106 x 64 in.)
    Didier William
    Gesture to Home (detail)
    , 2024

    Acrylic on panel
    269.2 x 162.6 cm (106 x 64 in.)

  •  

    Gesture to Home draws on William’s own experience as a Haitian-American artist, and his interest in how identity, geography, and memory are shaped by movement and displacement. The Louisiana swamps—both lush and historically weighted—act as more than a setting; they become a kind of archive. William has described the cypress trees as holding geological, historical, and ancestral meaning. In this sense, the installation becomes a space where nature, migration, and cultural memory are deeply connected.

    “The cypresses function as a historical archive, as well as an ancestral and geological archive".
    — Didier William

    In Gesture to Home, William reimagines the cypress trees as transhistorical vessels of the energy embodied by these omnipresent eyes. In the sculptures that are several meters tall and carved with countless eyes, figures rise upward from tapering mounds, their forms buttressed like the trunks of the trees. This interplay creates a circuit of interaction between the observer and the observed, dissolving the boundaries between subject and object and alluding to the asymmetrical power dynamics of colonialism.

     

    The artist reflects: “In the earlier and more recent paintings, by the time you get close enough to see that these are carved eyes, you realize they are looking back at you just as intently as you’re looking at them.” For William, the eyes symbolize a return of the gaze, challenging the possessiveness of sight. They act as a kind of armor, defining the figures as active, dynamic entities intertwined with the woodblock-patterned fabrics and reaching limbs around them.



  • Institutional exhibitions Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, US Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, US Bronx Museum...
    Gesture to Home (detail), 2024
    Acyrlic on Panel
    269.2 x 152.4 cm (106 x 60 in.)
    Institutional exhibitions

    Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, US

    Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, US

    Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, US

    Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, US

    Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA, US

    Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, US


    Public Collections

    Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, US

    Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, US

    de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, US

    Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, US

    Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA, US

    Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, US

    Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, US

    Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, US

    Mandeville Gallery at Union College, Schenectady, NY, US

    The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ, US

    The JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY, US

    Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, US


  • From left to right: Didier William, Gesture to Home (detail), 2024, ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel, 249.8 x 83.8 x 82.5 cm (98 ⅜ x 33 x 32 ½ in.); Gesture to Home (detail), 2024, ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel, 304.8 x 180.3 x 120.7 cm (120 x 71 x 47 ½ in.); Gesture to Home (detail), 2024, ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel, 241.3 x 101 x 132.1 cm (95 x 39 ¾ x 52 in.)

  • Didier William, Gesture to Home, 2024 Ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel 249.8 x 83.8 x 82.5...

    Didier William, 

    Gesture to Home, 2024

    Ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel

    249.8 x 83.8 x 82.5 cm (98 ⅜ x 33 x 32 ½ in.)

     

    Didier William (b. 1983, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work explores Blackness, diasporic identity, and the politics of visibility. His practice blends painting, printmaking, and wood carving, often featuring figures composed of carved eyes that confront the viewer, challenging traditional representations and power structures. William holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.

  • 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...

    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.

  • Didier William, Gesture to Home, Art Basel Unlimited, 2025

    Didier William, Gesture to Home, Art Basel Unlimited, 2025
  •  For further information, please contact inquiries@peterkilchmann.com