Bill Adams I'm Back, Damnit
September 18 - October 24, 2009
installation images selected works thumbnails
Press Release
KS ART announces I'm Back, Damnit a one-person exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Bill Adams. Works in this season's inaugural exhibition include shape-shifting portraits of frequently anthropomorphic characters: one-eyed felines, duck-billed humans, and armies of unnamable, darkly furry creatures all of which dissolve the boundaries between rational man and id-like beast. Other idiosyncratic portraits include expressively painted canvases of the German-born actor, Peter Lorre, holding the cinematic Maltese Falcon, and another of Conceptualist Dan Graham looking at himself quizzically in the mirror.
Bill Adam's stylized portraits of artists and beasts are either displaced self-portraits or metaphors for exploring the creative psyche in particular, or man's existential despair in general. In the drawing, I'm Back, Damnit (2009) Adams declares the artist's unspoken internal monologue explicitly animating -- or psychically structuring -- the creative act and the anxiety of artistic reception: one more time with feeling, the artist declares, "here I am." But Adams' work undermines this artistic hubris with characteristic pathos as a hybrid, duck-billed creature also neurotically demands, "What's so funny?" in a not-entirely-overpainted thought bubble. Similarly, in Already Been Done (2009), another of Adams' dark and furry cretins --- presumably another surrogate for the artist figure -- rebukes himself in a cartoonish thought bubble with another internal monologue: "Already been done," the eternally returning lament of artists and critics alike.
Adams imagery draws mostly from the general dustbin of popular culture, including comics, but also from America's psychic underbelly. It also draws as freely from non-professional art -- children's doodles, graffiti, and Outsider art -- as it does from its self-conscious nods to German Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist paintings, such as those by Franz Marc or Helmut Middendorf. As such, the anxiety of artistic influence -- along with the creative act itself--also takes center stage as both subject and object in Adams' purposively neurotic and unapologetically beautiful paintings that are at once completely self-conscious and completely sincere.
Adams works on paper are graphite, ballpoint pen, gouache, and watercolor and the paintings on canvas and linen are in oil. I'm Back, Damnit is Adam's third solo exhibition at KS ART. Bill Adams lives and works in New York City.
KS ART announces I'm Back, Damnit a one-person exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Bill Adams. Works in this season's inaugural exhibition include shape-shifting portraits of frequently anthropomorphic characters: one-eyed felines, duck-billed humans, and armies of unnamable, darkly furry creatures all of which dissolve the boundaries between rational man and id-like beast. Other idiosyncratic portraits include expressively painted canvases of the German-born actor, Peter Lorre, holding the cinematic Maltese Falcon, and another of Conceptualist Dan Graham looking at himself quizzically in the mirror.
Bill Adam's stylized portraits of artists and beasts are either displaced self-portraits or metaphors for exploring the creative psyche in particular, or man's existential despair in general. In the drawing, I'm Back, Damnit (2009) Adams declares the artist's unspoken internal monologue explicitly animating -- or psychically structuring -- the creative act and the anxiety of artistic reception: one more time with feeling, the artist declares, "here I am." But Adams' work undermines this artistic hubris with characteristic pathos as a hybrid, duck-billed creature also neurotically demands, "What's so funny?" in a not-entirely-overpainted thought bubble. Similarly, in Already Been Done (2009), another of Adams' dark and furry cretins --- presumably another surrogate for the artist figure -- rebukes himself in a cartoonish thought bubble with another internal monologue: "Already been done," the eternally returning lament of artists and critics alike.
Adams imagery draws mostly from the general dustbin of popular culture, including comics, but also from America's psychic underbelly. It also draws as freely from non-professional art -- children's doodles, graffiti, and Outsider art -- as it does from its self-conscious nods to German Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist paintings, such as those by Franz Marc or Helmut Middendorf. As such, the anxiety of artistic influence -- along with the creative act itself--also takes center stage as both subject and object in Adams' purposively neurotic and unapologetically beautiful paintings that are at once completely self-conscious and completely sincere.
Adams works on paper are graphite, ballpoint pen, gouache, and watercolor and the paintings on canvas and linen are in oil. I'm Back, Damnit is Adam's third solo exhibition at KS ART. Bill Adams lives and works in New York City.