Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present Margaux Williamson first solo exhibition in New York. The nine paintings in The Girls show Dostoevsky the new darkness come out of a year of conversations between Margaux Williamson and the writer Sheila Heti.

It was in the midst of this year that Williamson made a small painting study, from which this show takes its name. In it, two gyrating hula-girls with wide lipsticked smiles and flat faces join hands and show a grim Dostoevsky “the new darkness” through a hole in a shiny grey surface. The new darkness connotes an age that mixes a despair for the world, and a pessimism about the past and the long-term future, with a genuine excitement and joy about new ways of thinking and being. It also involves a creeping suspicion of oneself.

Margaux Williamson’s interest in surface, transparency, literalness, the middlebrow, and reality comes from deciphering the cast of Friends, the ideas of Werner Herzog, and her life. Her new paintings are funny and strong, deliberate and quiet. Their sculptural definiteness lends them a feeling of inevitability. In the new painting 2007, old candle drippings form a thick mass resembling Michelangelo’s comical body sacks, left behind after the souls depart. On top sit the small bright candles of pop.

Margaux Williamson was born in Pittsburgh in 1976, and moved to Canada from Texas at 13. She has lived in Toronto since 2000. She has exhibited in Toronto, Los Angeles and elsewhere.