There’s a woman crawling across a floor strewn with loose change. She could be in the aftermath of a breakup, or on the verge of vengeance. Her gaze, sharp and strangely amused, dares you to flinch. In Robin F. Williams’ world, that ambiguity isn’t a bug—it’s the engine.

Born in Columbus, Ohio and now working in Brooklyn, Williams is an artist who paints with one hand dipped in blood and the other in centuries of art history. Her current body of work reanimates the tropes of horror films—particularly the B-movie slasher variety—and transforms women from passive scream queens into agents of chaos, cunning, and catharsis.

These paintings don’t plead for your sympathy. They stare back.

The Horror as Mirror: Women Who Bleed, Burn, and Bite

Robin F. Williams does not parody horror; she devours it. In shows like Watch Yourself (Morán Morán, Mexico City), Undying (Perrotin Tokyo), and Good Mourning (P·P·O·W, New York), the artist retools the slasher genre’s most lurid clichés—Carrie’s bloodbath, Sally Hardesty’s hysterical escape, the Slumber Party Massacre drill scenes—into a slow-burning feminist reckoning.

The artist’s female figures are not “final girls” waiting to survive; they are post-survival. They’re laced with rage, sometimes smirking, sometimes manic. Their bruises glisten like gems, their poses echo martyrs and muses alike. In Slumber Party Martyrs (2023), Williams paints a tableau borrowed from Georges de La Tour’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene, reframing the horror of women in peril as an uncanny saintliness.

They’re not victims, they’re self-aware images that know what they’re doing—just like Olympia.

– Williams insists.

Oil, Gore, and Glaze: Painting as Alchemy

Williams paints with oil as though it were molten wax—thick, glistening, and slow to dry, like the aftermath of something unspeakable. Her use of airbrush, stenciling, and marbling recalls not only the glossy aesthetic of movie posters, but the unstable pixels of a paused VHS tape.

This isn’t nostalgia—it’s strategy.

Her portraits often appear filtered through layers of screen distortion and moiré effects, a sly reference to the mediated ways we consume femininity. These women are not themselves; they’re reflections of the desire and dread projected onto them. That meta-awareness is what makes her work feel so alive, even when it’s drenched in the aesthetics of death.

We live vicariously through these feminized emotions, they’re human emotions, just codified as female. I want access to all of them.

– She says.

In Dear Jane (2024), a woman reads a letter in what could be a bedroom—or a crime scene. The ambiguity is the point. Her expression in the finished painting is rage, not heartbreak. A shift of a brushstroke changes the narrative. A tiny highlight alters the whole emotional architecture.

Lowbrow Is a Lie: Elevating Trash, Excavating Power

Williams makes a cathedral of the grotesque. She cites Joan Semmel, George Tooker, and Édouard Manet as influences, but she’ll also tell you that her technique was reborn watching YouTube hobby painters. She’s as comfortable quoting I Spit on Your Grave as she is discussing chiaroscuro.

This is where the Jerry Saltz in her roars. Williams refuses the high/low binary. Her paintings sit in museums, yet pull their soul from the cinematic gutter—grinding aesthetic seriousness against pop-cultural pulp.

I didn’t want things so plotted out anymore, what made me most uncomfortable was returning to oil. So I did. It lets me work intuitively, scale up, and unravel things.

– Williams says.

This unraveling is key. Whether it’s gender, paint, or plot structure, her canvases undo the neatness we’ve come to expect from figurative painting. Her figures, while exquisitely rendered, vibrate with tension. They know they’re being watched—and they dare you to enjoy it.

A Homecoming of Ghosts

In her first solo museum show, We’ve Been Expecting You at the Columbus Museum of Art, Williams stages a high school reunion for her paintings. It’s more than a return to her hometown—it’s a gathering of decades of work, trauma, and transformation.

I get to roll around in those nuances and let them captivate me.

– Williams says.

Each canvas is a séance, a medium (in every sense) that allows feminized figures once flattened by genre to rise, stretch, and scream. Her women aren’t reclaiming space; they are reanimating it. They’re not reclaiming narratives—they’re rewriting them, blood and all.

Reader, let them captivate you too. But don’t expect to leave unshaken.