William Ludwig

Artistic background

William is a self-taught painter based in London. He trained and still works as an actor and singer and that background of storytelling shapes how he looks at the world and the truths that lie hidden.
He is drawn to portraiture and abstraction, often in the same breath. The magic of a shape, an unexpected colour, the way form can carry feeling. His paintings ask questions rather than answer them. What are we hiding, what are we performing, and what lives in the space between?
Much of his work centres on the self-portrait, using his own image as a starting point to explore identity, visibility, and what it means to exist as a queer person in a complicated world. Through colour, shape and the study of the human face, William keeps returning to the same essential question: who are we, really, and how do we tell that story?