Cover Image: Christopher Williams, Bergische Bauernscheune, Junkersholz Leichlingen, September 29, 2009, 2010. © Christopher Williams. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

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Apples, soap, haystacks, a smiling Playboy model, a rooster, children at play, a smiling photographer, a shop window, three cars, and a smiling four-year-old girl. Standard Pose, an exhibition of works by Christopher Williams (b. 1956), on view at the Paris gallery. 

This exhibition will explore the conventions and visual characteristics of different pictorial types. The show is at once an inventory of the pose; an assessment of the tools, the materials, and the structures and contexts of the photographic condition; and an investigation of these elements as they exist between visual and conceptual archetypes. This exhibition is not made up of images of reality, but rather the reality of these images.

Several of these color and black-and-white photographs, many from Williams’s iconic series For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle(2005–2014), have not been exhibited since the artist’s celebrated 2014–2015 retrospective The Production Line of Happiness, which was presented at the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.

The exhibition in Paris, the artist’s first solo show in the French capital since 1999, follows on Williams’s 2020 exhibition at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York, Footwear (Adapted for Use), and will mark his tenth solo show with David Zwirner. In spring 2021, Williams’s solo exhibition werbung: adapted for use was on view at Haubrok Foundation, Berlin, and in 2019 to 2020, C/O Berlin presented a solo show titled MODEL: Kochgeschirre, Kinder, Viet Nam (Angepasst zum Benutzen).