Jimmy Cauty/ Harry Adams 13 BRIDGES prints and exhibition poster

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13 BRIDGES
(Harry Adams Corrected)

By Jimmy Cauty and Harry Adams
Curated by STOT21stCplanB (STOT21)

Over the past thirteen years Harry Adams has carved out a reputation as being one of the finest landscape painters of the 21st Century. Their intense bucolic scenes of the English idyll tug uncomfortably with the sinister subtexts of industry, war and strife that were the historical architects of such scenes, whilst also alluding to our impending apocalyptic future.

However, the critical consensus has always been that something was missing. The artists argued that this “absence” was vital in essence to the poetic dissonance of the paintings – but no one was buying into that.

Whilst contemplating this issue in 2022, post-industrial artist Jimmy Cauty had a eureka moment of sublime genius and solved the problem. He noted both the scale and content of the paintings were completely wrong and set about correcting the situation. Working closely with Harry Adams, five mega-monumental paintings measuring hundreds of meters across were made along with 13 large studies to accompany them. All the paintings now featured huge bridges, roads and flyovers, confronting the viewer and drawing them into the work in a way that Harry Adams’ lone landscapes could never have achieved.

As Cauty explains:

“Some artists don’t know when to stop, others barely even start. Harry Adams makes a promising start on half imagined landscapes but consistently fails to see the bigger picture.

 By deftly dropping a few thousand tons of concrete and tarmac into the unfinished scenes the potential is realised and the completed landscape is now in perfect dis-harmony with 21st century infrastructure.”

To exhibit the mega-monumental works at the Black Cube a new ‘Cauty Wing’ was commissioned with immense galleries being carved out of the solid rock below Fish Island. The paintings were successfully hung but due to a gross miscalculation in the structural capacity of the walls the weight of the paintings caused all the galleries to catastrophically collapse in on themselves*.

Luckily the 13 studies were still in the main gallery, so rather than postpone or cancel the show, these are being shown instead.

We leave you to imagine them 13 times bigger.

*Cauty also had an “apocalypse proof’ bunker/recording studio made at the same time. One large enough to contain a full size Apache helicopter. He was recording this for the follow-up to his hit single CHINOOK when the galleries collapsed and is now trapped in the studio behind the rubble. He says he’s happy where he is, has plenty of crisps to eat and still busy on the new track; so we’re not to dig him out until it’s completed.