101/EXHIBIT is proud to present How Human of You by Los Angeles artist Kent Williams.  The exhibition will be accompanied by a 32-page show catalog featuring a poem written by Los Angeles poet Eve Wood. A book signing will be held with the artist from 6-7pm, followed by an opening reception from 7 – 10pm on Saturday, October 25th. How Human of You will run through December 20th at the 101/EXHIBIT West Hollywood space, located at 8920 Melrose Ave on the corner of North Almont Drive, one block south of Santa Monica Blvd.

For his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Kent Williams propelled his dexterity with painterly mark-making beyond spatial realism into the viscerally abstract. Having formerly exhibited with Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles for nearly twenty years, a change of hands in representation to 101/EXHIBIT marks a decidedly accelerated transition towards abstraction. Though the artist has not completely abandoned his idiosyncratically representational elements for this show, certain examples of total abstraction will be present  for the first time in this exhibition.

With a storied career behind him that saw notable forays into the graphic novel, Williams has maintained a passionate relationship with drawing and the ways it directly informs painting. Acknowledging painting's grand history and the importance it plays to this day in how we see ourselves, Williams has long considered the human figure to be the vehicle to represent the human condition.

His acute sense of human anatomy has been a staple in his work, yet as we see with How Human Of You, the natural tendency we have to explore, experiment, and transition has lead Williams to fresh ground. Moving from his previous body of work, Convergence, which saw an incredible balancing act of identifiably representational and abstract elements within the same composition, the new paintings function on the border between these two polarities. The representational properties of one painting inform the highly abstracted motifs of another, assisting the viewer in contextually processing non-objective works. The evolutionary processes that have taken place in Williams’ practice of late are fully evident, and can be celebrated as a pivotal moment where new artistic terrain is unearthed.

Kent Williams' work has been the subject of more than twenty solo exhibitions, including shows in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Sundance, UT, The Duke Museum of Art, Durham, NC, Santa Fe, NM, and Paris. Williams has participated in many group exhibitions, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, in Washington, DC in 2006 – 2007. Williams' work has been widely published both in the US and abroad, has won numerous awards, and includes three monographs; Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992 – 2007, Eklektikos, and most recently, Ophthalm.

101/EXHIBIT was founded in 2008 in Miami, FL. Named after its original location, 101 NE 40th St., the gallery actively represents an international group of prolific emerging and established contemporary artists. Initially built around artists who place an emphasis upon figurative concerns, the gallery program continues to expand, embracing unparalleled craft, counter trend experimentation, New Media, and deviations into abstraction, installation-forward, and object-based works to expand the greater initiative of the program.