COMA is proud to present Pentimento, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Justin Williams (b. 1984), this marks the artist’s fifth presentation with the gallery. On view from 28 August through 3 October, 2026, at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, 2204.
The exhibition takes its title from the art historical term pentimento, which describes the trace of an earlier image or brushstroke that remains visible beneath the surface of a painting. For Williams, the term reflects both the way he works and the way he thinks about identity. Nothing is ever entirely erased. Each mark, decision and experience leaves something behind.
Williams depicts figures drawn from history, from family, from the recesses of personal mythology, each rendered through the artist's own body as sole reference. Each carries the residue of the artist's own presence: a borrowed gesture, a familiar weight, a face that is almost but never quite his own. The self, in Williams' hands, becomes a vessel, passed between subjects, emptied and refilled, never fully possessed by any one of them.
This logic extends into the ceramics. Wheel-thrown and fired alongside the paintings, the works in clay carry the literal imprint of making, of a practice rebuilt after injury, of a body relearning itself through repetition and heat. The vessels appear both within the paintings, held by figures in gestures of offering, contemplation and release, and as autonomous objects in the space, grounding the exhibition in the domestic and the tactile. Many cultures have long produced objects of extraordinary beauty without recourse to the category of art; Williams is interested in that ambiguity, the fine line between use and meaning, between a thing that holds and a thing that signifies.
Together, the works consider identity as something layered and continually reworked. Rather than presenting a singular portrait, Pentimento reveals the accumulation of many selves, each still faintly visible beneath the surface.
