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The highlights of the fall exhibition season are starting early, with a show we have been circling opening this week at Anat Ebgi: Brittney Leeanne Williams’ The Form in Which the Spirit Dresses. This is Williams first solo in Los Angeles, a homecoming so to speak for the Pasadena-born painter.
The Form in Which the Spirit Dresses continues Williams’s interest in the notion of theophany—the visible manifestation of deities. Many compositions take inspiration from the artist’s research and references of biblical genre paintings, that depict angelic apparitions wrestling, conversing, or engaging human beings. In these narratives angels are archetypal forms—guards, messengers, and bearers of symbols. The human character is often rewarded for struggling with the angel or heeding its message. Williams also draws on ideas of angels as dialogic or instructional partners embodied in texts such as Talking With Angels by Gitta Mallasz (published 1979), from which the show’s title is drawn. For Williams, angelic visitation becomes a metaphor for intense feelings of disconnection from revelation or creative power—also known as artist’s block. The paintings explore exalted emotions, attainment of wisdom, and the struggle to comprehend the world beyond what is in front of our eyes.
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