No matter how she evolves as a painter, you can recognize a Robin F Williams work right off the bat. It's a gift of talent. If you were to look at her works from a decade ago to now, they have morphed and transformed in so many different directions and yet there is a core that remains the same. There is a challenge of body, of selfhood, of something otherworldly in all of us. Her newest body of work, Out Lookers, is on view now at PPOW Gallery through November 13, 2021. 

"I am interested in micro-expressions and how we read each other's cues," Williams told us in her cover story back in 2019. "There seems to be a lot of illiteracy around body language and not enough acknowledgment that non-verbal cues can be, and sometimes have to be, very complicated. There is often a level of emotional intelligence that is needed to read these cues, and women are bathed in this knowledge." As the gallery notes for this show, "Ebbing between abstraction and figuration, Williams subverts the conventional figure-ground relationship to transform restrictive female tropes into expanded matrices that transcend the body."

These works balance abstraction and something almost astral, a new form of portrait work that almost comes from another dimension. It has the quality of all-knowing and new-seeing. Subversion and overt. The Out Lookers are looking in. —Evan Pricco