
Exhibition preview·London
Robin F. Williams Paints Techno-Dystopia: Act Natural Opens at P.P.O.W in London
Robin F. Williams's new exhibition Act Natural at P.P.O.W's 9 Cork Street space in London stages the collision of AI, religion and celebrity culture, with Infinite Scroll depicting a figure with glowing fingertips transfixed by a phone.
A new exhibition of Robin F. Williams's work has opened at P.P.O.W's London space on Cork Street, with works that mine the uncanny intersection of artificial intelligence, religious iconography and celebrity culture.
The show, titled Act Natural and on view until October 24, presents a suite of new paintings that place Williams's signature figurative style in dialogue with contemporary technology. Infinite Scroll (2026), a 42-by-44-inch canvas, depicts a nude figure with frazzled hair sitting up in bed, staring at a phone held in hands whose fingertips glow red — an emblem of digital compulsion.
In The Merminator (2026), a 60-by-40-inch oil on linen, Williams fuses a cyborg assassin with a Disney-princess mermaid in a mashup that probes how pop culture and machine intelligence bleed into one another. I Am Not a Robot takes a more art-historical tack, arranging its composition symmetrically to echo both Hilma af Klint's spiritualist abstractions and Botticelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate — with a phone standing in for the fruit.
The exhibition continues Williams's project of staging contemporary life through the grammar of devotional painting: across the new canvases, the phone becomes relic, icon and devotional object by turns, and the figure — whether scrolling, cyborg or devout — is caught between allure and horror at what technology promises. The show positions her as one of the sharpest young chroniclers of a culture negotiating life inside the feed.
Williams has built her reputation on portraits that stage contemporary anxieties through old-master means, and the London show continues that project at full throttle. With devotional formats — the symmetrical icon, the pietà-like repose — repurposed for an age of feeds and machine intelligences, Act Natural asks what it means to worship at the altar of the phone.


