P·P·O·W is pleased to present Act Natural, Robin F. Williams’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and the gallery’s first international pop-up presentation at Frieze’s 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 a place 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.

Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. They have presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Morán Morán, Mexico City, Mexico; Perrotin, Tokyo, Japan; and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Robin F. Williams: We’ve Been Expecting You, Williams’s first solo institutional exhibition, was on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH in 2024. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; CC Foundation, Shanghai, China; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others. In spring 2026, The FLAG Art Foundation presented Williams’s work as part of their Spotlight series, pairing a never-before-exhibited artwork with newly commissioned text by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh.