Selected Reviews & Interviews
“Public House; Margaux Williamson” by Rosemary Flutur
C Magazine, Canada Dec 2025
Her paintings remind me to think about light in a new way, the same way each painting’s so-called movement changes my tune on time: that something so ubiquitous and unavoidable can also be magnificent. But Williamson isn’t using painting to lose herself in the latter point. The impact is in the image. And while light may be the phenomenon that takes me beyond the ordinary moment, that same banal moment is precisely where I’m experiencing that magic. This is key. When I stand in front of a work like Public House, what I see is a dive bar on a slow night, where the bar top is sticky, the scent of stale beer steeps in the air, and the bathroom could use some love. It’s not exactly the scene I’d envision would elicit this response, but it doesn’t matter: I am in a state of soft awe.”
“MOCA review: The intuition at play in Margaux Williamson’s paintings” by Tatum Dooley
Review
Toronto Today, Toronto 2025
“The painting of MOCA, aptly and simply titled Museum, includes the space’s iconic pillars and cement construction. In Williamson’s hands, the cement looks more like Monet’s Water Lilies: full of depth, colour, and light. Even though the canvas is flat, there’s the illusion of depth. By including a painting of the space the viewer is standing in, we get closer to understanding the magic the artist engages in. The space is just as real as it is imagined.“
“CANNOPY x Margaux Williamson” by Michael Zarathus-Cook
text and interview
Cannopy, Canada, 2025
“The top floor of the MOCA exhibit space is reserved for the deeply contemplative family of pieces by artist Margaux Williamson, entitled Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars.”
Margaux Williamson and Sheila Heti with curator Rui Mateus Amaral | Artist x Artist | MOCA Toronto
video of public talk
MOCA Toronto, 2025
“Immersive Intimacies: Margaux Williamson” by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Review
Galleries West, Calgary 2025
“The reflections in Williamson’s works are not unceasing processions of simulacra, but invitations to look more closely, to immerse oneself in the private, quiet sentience of things and places that light us up, let us be, and keep their secrets too.”
“Margaux Williamson at MOCA” by Rashana Youtzy
Review
ARTORONTO, 2025
“Williamson’s ‘Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars’ holds a mirror up to our lives.”
”Margaux Williamson - Expanding the Present”
Video by McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2024
“Margaux Williamson” by Marc Mayer
Ekphrasis, Montreal 2023
“This is a quietly subversive show and I loved being in it.”
“The place between me and a friend, the place between me and a painting” by Meeka Walsh, Interview by Robert Enright
Border Crossings, Painting Issue 167, Winnipeg 2023
“Margaux Williamson talks about places between, and we covet and guard the gap of this sometimes barely measurable space that is between. It is generative and it can mean two ways—a gap or opening and a connection of one to another, between things.”
“Margaux Williamson’s unruly works from home” interview with Esmé Hogeveen
Art Forum, New York 2022
“The word ‘anarchy’ came up in a couple of the texts written for the exhibition, which surprised me, but also made sense. I find the world quite chaotic, and I have always struggled to see meaning. I do see it sometimes, in a kind of order or self-organization that comes out of debris.”
“Margaux Williamson in the Studio” text and interview with Elliat Albrecht
Ocula, Hong Kong 2022
“Representation is tangled in the paintings, space and perspective are unfixed, and narrative appears only to disappear.”
“Margaux Williamson at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery” by Tyler Muzzin
Akimbo, Toronto 2022
“Writing about painting through the lens of time seems like a readymade critical methodology that could be applied to almost anything. What’s worth addressing, though, is why an artist with an adept facility for filmmaking, performance, and ephemera would use static media to tackle the most quotidian, yet most elusive subject of all.”
“The homes of others: Margaux Williamson’s brilliantly disordered ‘Interiors’ at McMichael are a rare glimpse into people’s inner lives” by Ruth Jones
Toronto Star, April 3 2022
“You can stand between a painting of a pine tree and one of a storm and feel for a moment suspended, like the waves of both are holding you up, alive in the world and alive inside, moving through all your own interiors in a way that leaves a wake.”
“The Comfort of Strangers” by Max Henry
Spike Art Magazine, March 2021, Berlin
“Margaux Williamson & Sheila Heti” Interview for “Interiors” Catalogue
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Toronto 2021
“Margaux Williamson’s Hard-Earned Magic” by Ben Lerner
Frieze Magazine, London
Issue 213, September 2020
“There is a certain kind of genius that doesn’t ask you to congratulate it for the tortuousness of its process, that communicates its vision openly, that shares its code.”
“How One Painter Captures the Wonder of Ordinary Spaces; Margaux Williamson’s portraits of interiors pay homage to what’s right in front of us,” by Sophie Weiler
Walrus Magazine, Toronto, June 2020
“Through her art, living spaces offer the potential for us to indulge in the present.”
“Episode 16: “What Makes Great Art?” with Margaux Williamson,” with Sky Goodden
Momus Podcast, Toronto, 2020
“The guests (on Momus) include some fascinating Canadian artists who deserve broader recognition, including the “slow” painter Margaux Williamson, who speaks about how “boredom and patience leads to complicated things.”
From Jori Finkel’s “10 Binge-Worthy Art Podcasts in the Age of Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 20 2020
"I Could See Everything; An Interview with Margaux Williamson," by Laura Horne-Gaul
Tussle Art Magazine, New York 2015
"I recommend that you watch her film Teenager Hamlet, read her manifestos, How To Dress In Our New World, How To See In The Dark, and How To Act In Real Life, and be deeply moved by her paintings… Margaux Williamson presents an incredible oeuvre of brutally honest, beautiful, seemingly grimy painting. I Could See Everything, perhaps was a momentary or lengthy gift of sight, providing Williamson with the insight to life/art."
"Margaux Williamson’s Welcome Confusion," by Ana Cecilia Alvarez
Adult magazine, New York 2015
“paintings that at first felt plainspoken, appealing in the apparent simplicity of their observations, yet were coupled with titles, with implications, that vaulted their stakes with the universal, with the totality of experience.”
"This flat-screen world" by Kenneth Goldsmith
The Believer magazine, New York, 2014
"I was taken aback when I was so taken aback by Margaux Williamson’s paintings."
“Margaux Williamson’s Paintings for an Imaginary Museum” interview with Erica Schwiegershausen
New York Magazine, 2014
“I feel lucky in some ways that I’ve struggled with finding meaning in seeing art or making art because it is a genuine joy for me when I do find meaning or see how things so magically fit together—and to have hope that there is a more elegant structure than the one we’ve been handed.”
"Margaux Williamson Imagines Her Paintings in a Museum at the Top of the World," by Thessaly La Force
Vogue, New York 2014
“We’ve always tried to do this with painting,” Williamson answered. “You’re painting the apple to see if there is more meaning in the apple if you paint it. It was less that I was seeing it, it was more about how I was seeing it, what I was trying to see in it.”
"Joking/ Not Joking At All," Interview with Craig Taylor
Five Dials, Issue 34, London 2014
“Painter Margaux Williamson’s new book, I Could See Everything, is a catalogue for an exhibit that never existed.”
"Talking to all the smartest people in the world," by Joanna Pocock
3:am magazine, London 2014
“One of her paintings, sadly not in the London show, We painted the women and children first (Gerhard Richter’s painting Dead) is a version of the well-known Richter work: a head, horizontal, a black slash across its white throat. Williamson’s however is less like a painted photograph and more like a painted painting. And with the addition of her title she repositions it – as a woman living in the world now. It is not a critique of the great German artist, but a riposte. He may have painted women, like so many other painters through the centuries, but what about saving them? There is a limit to art, Williamson seems to be saying. The use of the plural pronoun doesn’t let Williamson off the hook either. If there is culpability, she is the first to hold up her hand.”
"Margaux Williamson: Meet the artist whose life has been the stuff of fiction," by James Adams
Globe and Mail, Toronto 2014
"I Could See Everything: Margaux Williamson," by Hilary Harkness
Huffington Post, New York 2014
“Review of Margaux Williamson’s I Could See Everything,” by Chelsea Rooney
Capilano Review, Vancouver 2014
“In the last painting, We saw the racism carved in stone, she gives no body parts for us to contextualize our own bigotry. Instead, she paints one of racism’s most effective structures, a cluster of ghettoized buildings, in browns and camo greens, teetering and sinking into mud. Perhaps Nietzsche, in the late nineteenth century, could maintain the privileged fallacy that we cannot know the consequences of our actions. Williamson, of the twenty-first century, can, and does, see everything.”
“A Walk in the dark with Margaux Williamson” with Sook-Yin Lee
CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, October 2013
"I will speak daggers," by Megan McDonald Walsh
Bomb Magazine, New York 2012
"As someone who so fluently shifts between the written word and the image, I wanted to interview Williamson about her bilingual gifts and her reasons for so often incorporating both into her works. Over the course of a few weeks, we emailed each other, and I had the pleasure of understanding more about this charming Renaissance woman through her (predictably) articulate words.”
“Teenager Hamlet” by Daniel Garber
Cultural Mining, 2010
“Here’s a chance to see Hamlet without the Shakespeare, without the stage, without the costumes, and without the actors.”
“Dancing to the End of Poverty”
Playground Magazine, Madrid 2009
“Finally, a generation using YouTube the way God intended.”
“Rewind: Margaux Williamson,” by Davie Balzer
Canadian Art Magazine, Spring 2009
"Such feelings become everyone's invitation into Williamson's vision; we may not recognize the story (that is, if one is even being told), but we get the sense, and know there is magic in it. Somehow, by lurking in her secret world long enough, Williamson has learned to speak broadly, to master the delicate art of magnanimity."
“Moments that Mattered; Teen Spirit” by Heather O'Neill
New York Times Magazine, New York, Nov 2008
“Interview with Margaux Williamson; Hamlet-Inspired”, by Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh
NY Arts Magazine 2008
“The Movie Is The Medium, Teenager Hamlet”, by Leah Sandals
National Post, Toronto Sept 6 2008
“Future Projections, Teenager Hamlet”, by Damian Rogers
Eye Weekly, Toronto 2008