Alexander Adams
Boy (version A) , 5 April 1998
Oil on Canvas
50.5 x 36 cm
Signed and dated verso
HOWEVER WEAK, FLAWED, EVIL OR UNFASHIONABLE, THE ARTIST – AND WE MUST REMEMBER THAT EVERY PERSON (INCLUDING US) IS THE PRODUCT OF OUR ERA AND CULTURE - TELLS US A TRUTH ABOUT OURSELVES THAT WE MAY NOT WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE.
A selection of new and never previously exhibited paintings by Alexander Adams (b. 1973) at Aleph Contemporary explores the issues of defacement and ruin. Adams's paintings of ruins (contemporary, historical and ancient) began in 1995, featuring scenes of wartime destruction and romantic ruins. New paintings feature views of Dresden and Warsaw. Adams's paintings of defaced figures confront the wave of public iconoclasm since the summer of 2020 but the series began in 1996. In startling images of unnamed figures, the faces have been erased, blending careful description and dramatic gestures of painterly abstraction. Oil paintings from the 1990s and 2000s never shown before will be joined by ruin and defaced-figure paintings made especially for the Stroud exhibition.
This will be Adams's first solo exhibition in Britain for over a decade, since returning to England from a period living in Berlin.
Alexander Adams (b. 1973, London) is a British painter. He studied fine art at Goldsmiths College, London in the 1990s before exhibiting widely. His art is in the collection of the V&A, the National Museum of Wales, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, as well as private and corporation collections worldwide. He won the 2018 Artist Scholarship of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, Monaco. He has lived in London, Spain and Berlin; he currently lives and works in the North of England
