Lucy Williams: Radiant City

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Radiant City, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist Lucy Williams. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s third solo presentation with Williams and will be on view from November 6, 2025, through January 8, 2026. The exhibition coincides with Williams’s new publication, Radiant City. The gallery will host an artist discussion, moderated by Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design atSFMOMA, and a book release event at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6, 2025, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. 

Williams’s works are fastidiously engineered to produce uncanny miniature worlds suspended between the second and third dimensions—facades that are simultaneously industrial and tactile. Drawing on modernist buildings and interiors, Williams redefines collage through intricately crafted mixed-media bas-reliefs. Her sleek, serene scenes of period architecture ripple with texture and aqueous reflections. She simulates the tiled surfaces of swimming pools, the austere facades of Brutalist buildings, and the regimented rows of libraries and bookcases. Painstakingly hand-crafted, Williams constructs her works in ascending layers of varying materials such as paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, piano wire, and thread.

Beginning with a full-scale pencil drawing, Williams creates a digital copy from which she laser cuts the structural base and hand-cuts colored paper to form curtains, blinds, books, vases, pots, and lampshades. Each piece is laid on top of the drawing until she is ready to collage within a shallow space, adding paper home furnishings as she builds the work. Panels are over-stitched with thread, and a Perspex layer is used to replicate the windows, all of which have been etched and hand-painted to add further detail. Of her process, she says: “You have to give it as much time as possible, it’s really important, because in time is the transformation.”

Through embroidery and a warm tonal palette, Williams’s work exploits the tension between the humane, intimate spaces she produces and the hard-edge geometric buildings she references. The perceived depth and inherent flatness of the work occupy the liminal space between painting and sculpture. “Her work resonates with the textures and geometries of Anni Albers and Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Ruth Asawa—not just in their forms, but in the energy, dedication, and intentionality they brought to their work,” said Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition title Radiant City comes from Le Corbusier's unrealized architectural proposal for a utopian megalopolis that would seamlessly integrate humankind with nature and the technological innovations of the twentieth century. The concrete apartments—composed of modular units, imposing towers, and symmetry—were conceived to address urgent housing needs and to use modern architecture as a tool for societal reform. While Radiant City itself was never realized, its principles came to life in the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The patchwork play of color and light across the façade of what might otherwise have been a monotonous expanse resulted in one of modern architecture's most iconic designs. In Radiant City, Williams captures the delicate balance of materiality, shape, and color that made Unité d’Habitation so visually resonant. She does this through multiple iterations, probing the tension between social egalitarianism and a dehumanizing uniformity.

Radiant City will feature both representational and abstract works by Williams. During the pandemic, she began experimenting with non-representational compositions to explore the rhythmic, repetitive visual qualities of form. This experimentation allowed her to develop new threading techniques, which she then brought into her representational works, along with miniature versions of the abstractions themselves. “Slate, aubergine and rose triangles float over vertical threads of different colours and thicknesses, adding a lyrical stringed element to the already dynamic forms. In these, Williams controls space like the modernists Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth before her,” said art critic Charlotte Mullins. Though the figure never appears in her work, one need only view it in person to experience the narrative power of her spaces—how they draw the viewer in, both baffled by their fabrication and longing to occupy their meditative worlds.

Lucy Williams was born in Oxford, England, in 1972. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 1996 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2003. The artist has since exhibited her work internationally, with solo shows including Pavilion at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2012), Festival at McKee Gallery, New York (2014) and Pools at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017). Williams’s work has also been represented in major group exhibitions, such as Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2008), After curated by Marjolaine Levy at Galerie Mitterand, Paris (2013), and Cut & Paste | 400 Years of Collage at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019). Williams currently lives and works in London.