Robin F. Williams has a retirement plan in mind for the Terminator. Perhaps the shape-shifting robot assassin from James Cameron’s iconic movie series might consider a life beyond killing. Something quieter by the sea. “What if he really wanted to become a beautiful mermaid?” the artist asks during a walkthrough of their Greenpoint studio ahead of “Act Natural,” their first solo exhibition in London, presented by P·P·O·W at Frieze's gallery, No. 9 Cork Street.
Such is the vision behind Merminator, 2026, a painting in which an androgynous figure with a metallic blue body braces against a rocky ledge. The creature’s long tail curls through the water below, and a yellow-green glow surrounds its head. Life at sea looks good, rendered in Williams’ signature style of luminous colors, exaggerated figures, and surfaces that seem to shift between the painterly and digital. “We are in a time when there is enough information, enough freedom, enough agency for us to choose something different,” they say. “But we’re still choosing to be the cop-killing machine.”
Throughout “Act Natural,” Williams imagines what might happen if familiar characters stopped obeying the stories written for them. In Medium Mermaid, 2026, Ariel and Ursula become a single figure, bringing Disney’s good girl and queer-coded villains into the same body. In I Am Not a Robot, 2026, an angel attempts to pass a facial-recognition test to prove it is real. Even these imaginary beings, whose identities we learned long before we thought to question them, can find themselves wanting another life—or having to explain the one they have. For the artist who has long used painting to question the roles and expectations that shape our identities, this deferred freedom feels particular to the moment we’re living through, when so much of identity seems open to reinvention yet the same hierarchies persist.
The exhibition grew in part from Williams’ fascination with Captchas, the automated online tests that gatekeep non-human access to websites. As we identify traffic lights or distorted letters, we're also teaching the machines how we think. “We want them to reach that level, but then we also want them to stay in some perfect zone where we know the difference between them and us,” Williams says. “It’s this impossible prompt for us and for the machine to act natural.”
Williams has been thinking about who gets to define “natural” elsewhere, too. Reading Judith Butler’s 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender? sharpened their interest in the authority that institutions claim over gender and sexuality. Their references include angels from Catholic Madonna and Child paintings, spiritual abstractions by Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton, and Siri’s glowing interface. The particular light and color that once indicated spiritual enlightenment is now echoed in the aesthetic of a virtual assistant, Williams observes. These visual similarities aren’t accidental: Tech companies invoke religious imagery to encourage belief in their products. “They’re trying to convince us that the algorithm, A.I., is this god. Something that knows all, sees all, is bigger than us, is the sum of us,” they say. “And that’s a very seductive idea.”
The collision of the spiritual and the artificial is a natural progression for Williams, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and first gained recognition for large-scale paintings that challenged conventional depictions of women in advertising and popular culture. In Alexa Plays Ball, 2018, for instance, they reworked a cigarette advertisement by stripping its smiling figures naked and replacing the woman’s enthusiasm with a look of discomfort. Over time, their subjects have grown stranger, drawing from horror films and the increasingly human personas of virtual assistants.
Williams understands the appeal of a higher intelligence, but remains skeptical of those in Silicon Valley claiming to have created one. “I think it’s more important than ever to remember who has the money, and not give all our power to them,” they say. At No. 9 Cork Street, that power becomes visible in Infinite Scroll, 2026, in which a figure’s iris takes on the rectangular shape of the phone it holds. Williams recognizes the algorithmic loop from their own late-night scrolling: Between anxiety and relief, there’s always a reason to stay. “All it cares about is keeping you there and getting you to buy something,” they say. “It’s not good at being God.
But not every invisible force governing our lives belongs to an algorithm. In Spooky Action at a Distance, 2026, Williams turns to quantum physics. Named for Albert Einstein’s description of quantum entanglement, the painting places overlapping figures at a swimming hole, a metaphor for the mysterious ways people might be connected. Such ideas have found an unlikely second life in New Age spirituality, where theories about the invisible connections between particles have inspired ideas about fate, parallel realities, and the possibility of multiple selves. Williams plays with this framework, imagining different versions of the same person, each with a different possibility for connection: in one timeline, someone flirts with you; in another, perhaps they don’t. Having agreed on so much throughout our conversation, Williams jokes we must be on the same algorithm.
For the artist, there’s pleasure in not knowing. It’s something they want painting to make room for: an encounter with an unfamiliar idea that doesn’t immediately become a test of allegiance or a cause for alarm. They describe it as “a comfortable breath between fear and reality.” You can stand in front of a painting, feel whatever it provokes, and stay long enough to reconsider.
“Robin Williams: Act Natural” is on view through October 24, 2026, at No. 9 Cork Street at 9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London W1S 3LL, United Kingdom.
–Sahir Ahmed