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9 Cork Street, W1S 3LL, London, United Kingdom
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Artist: Robin F. Williams
P·P·O·W presents Act Natural, Robin F. Williams’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and the gallery’s first international pop-up presentation at Frieze No.9 Cork Street.
Expanding upon their previous investigations into horror films and the feminization of AI assistants, Williams fuses art historical, literary, and pop culture references to create their multivalent narrative compositions. Featuring a new body of paintings and works on paper, Act Natural serves as both the title of the exhibition and a prompt leading viewers into an uncanny valley where science, technology, and mysticism collide.
Since 2018, Williams has developed a body of work that examines the growing reliance on virtual assistants, most notably Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. This longstanding interest serves as the foundation for Williams’s latest paintings that explore a revival of the gothic sublime shaped by the fears and fervor surrounding society’s rapidly changing technological landscape and the accelerating rise of AI. Returning to an aesthetic blending of awe and terror in the face of vast uncontrollable forces that defy human reason, works such as Language Model, 2026, embody a hybrid state of being. Engulfed in a swirling torrent, the female figure teeters on the edge of romance and horror, birth and death, real and artificial. She is at once of nature and removed from it.
Building upon this cyclical tension between innovation and collapse, works such as Infinite Scroll and I Am Not a Robot, both 2026, explore our increasing dependence on digital technologies and social media. Referencing the composition of Will Barnet’s Woman Reading, 1970, Infinite Scroll portrays a bifurcated reality, contrasting a physical world of sallow, acidic tones and gritty textures against a digital realm of vibrant hues and matte smoothness encased within an unending loop. Framed by medusa-like tendrils of hair, the figure is tethered to and detached from the world around her as her iris morphs to mirror the brick shape of the phone. Similarly, I Am Not a Robot layers visual allusions to Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna della Melagrana, c. 1487; Hilma af Klint’s Untitled #1, 1915; and Paul Klee’s Senecio, 1922, to create a contemporary Madonna, fingers glowing orange from the increased blood flow required for scrolling.
Drawing its title from Albert Einstein’s famous description of quantum entanglement, a physical phenomenon in which pairs or groups of particles become linked across time and space, Spooky Action at a Distance depicts an intermingled pair of bodies amidst a verdant swimming hole. Describing painting and its history as “a kind of entanglement” itself, Williams evokes the landscapes of Agnes Pelton and the Transcendental Painting Group, whose stated purpose was “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” Channeling this suggestive rather than specific approach to spirituality and landscape, Williams’s Spooky Action at a Distance acts as a portal, revealing the invisible connections we form and carry with us as we move through the world.
Act Natural will be accompanied by a zine offering visitors insight into Williams’s source imagery.
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