Angharad Williams
Portrait
illy Present Future 2024 Prize Exhibition
Curated by Bernardo Follini
Opening: October 28, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
October 29, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Via Modane 16, Turin
On the occasion of Artissima 2025, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Portrait, the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution by artist Angharad Williams, winner of the illy Present Future Prize 2024, the twenty-fifth edition of the initiative promoted by illycaffè and Artissima.
Working across multiple mediums, Williams’ projects are grounded in careful research and informed by their site and context, inviting reflection on the forces that structure our lives and environments.
For this exhibition, the artist presents a new painting that explores themes of representation and the history of gentry portraiture. Portrait extends Williams’ ongoing exploration of exhibition-making, collaboration and the mechanics of method and style in painting, notably through the iconography and legacy of German painter Gerhard Richter.
The exhibition revolves around a single image: Lady Diana, seated with her back to the viewer, wearing her iconic red jumper decorated with white sheep and a single black one. The composition echoes Betty (1988), the famous portrait of Richter’s daughter. Like Betty, Diana withholds her gaze from the viewer, turning away from the frontality and iconographic overexposure that has defined her public image for decades.
The painting is the outcome of a long philological and creative process: a detailed study of Richter’s pictorial technique in Betty, the careful construction of light, the modelling of the pose, and the reconstruction of the back of Diana’s head, a visual perspective largely absent from the collective memory, dominated by representations of her face. Through this approach, Williams interrogates the relationship between public image and the construction of visual power, transforming a global icon into an opaque, unavailable image.
Suspended between image and picture, vision and material, Portrait reflects on painting as an act of memory, a practice capable of restoring complexity to what media images tend to simplify. Painting thus becomes a way to question social and cultural hierarchies, and to reflect on the mechanisms that shape how power and bodies are represented.
Angharad Williams is an artist based in Ynys Cybi, Wales, and Berlin, Germany.
Williams’ singular practice is multifaceted, working across several disciplines in an intentionally un-disciplined manner, and marked by a highly responsive approach to site and context. Often equivocal in expression, her works are rooted in writing and shaped by questions of authority, security, and design.
She has had solo exhibitions at KIN, Brussels; Simian, Copenhagen (both 2025); Schiefe Zaehne, Berlin (2024); Fanta, Milan (2023); Mostyn, Llandudno; Kunstverein Düsseldorf (both 2022), Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna (2021). Williams has participated in numerous group exhibitions at prestigious institutions and galleries including Bechtler Stiftung, Uster (2025); Museo Madre, Naples, and The Wig, Berlin (both 2024); Reena Spaulings, New York (2023); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2022); FriArt, Fribourg, (2021). Angharad is a participant in the 2025 Edition of the Okayama Art Summit: The Parks of Aomame, curated by Philippe Parreno.
Performances have taken place at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2025), Sadie Coles HQ (2024), and Zunsthalle Zurich (2023).
Eraser, Williams’s first book of fiction, was published by After8 Books, Paris, and Kunstverein Düsseldorf in 2023. In Fall 2025 Williams will release Now Watch This Drive, a limited 12” vinyl, with Concentric Group, London, and the Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau.
