Harry Adams COLLIDER Part 3
(an installation)
COLLIDER Part 3 presents large-scale landscape paintings of “great terror and beauty”, featuring flooded lands and turbulent skies. Installed alongside prints, books, and other works by the artist over three floors of a retro-futuristic art clinic. The exhibition is part of Mayfair Art Weekend.
Collider Part 3
The Clinic, 56 Brook Street, W1K 5NE, London
12:30-6pm daily
Private View: 25th June
Press Release
The third and final part of Harry Adams’ COLLIDER Project presents a series of large- scale screen-print paintings and other works by the artist over three floors of a retro-futuristic art clinic in the heart of Mayfair, London.
The screen-print paintings, some reminiscent of giant Rorschach inkblot tests, are made by layering, overlapping and inverting multiple painted and screen-printed motifs depicting flooded lands and turbulent skies. Cultivating tensions between the organic aesthetics of painterly chaos and the systematic methodology of print-making, Harry Adams creates works brimming with the energy of fragmented worlds in collision. Relishing human errors, and the tactile qualities of layered pigment, the overlayed screen-pulls are used to construct new realms on the brink of pictorial calamity.
Installed within the pristine whiteness of The Clinic, under the constant drone of an industrial ventilation system, potted oak saplings grown in the artist’s studio sit incongruously in the sterile space on plinths that emit strange sounds – a soundtrack for the exhibition recorded by the artist(s). Themes of nature in revolt and dystopian science fiction run throughout Adams’ work, alongside the tradition of romantic landscape painting contrasted with process art: all riffing off a love of repetition and Warhol’s ambition to “become a machine” in making paintings.
Private View: 25th June
RSVP required L-13@L-13.org
Background
The COLLIDER Project started with a fabricated hypothesis for an imagined art experiment by an invented art critic that lead to the creation of physical artworks “of great terror and beauty”: 86 screen-print paintings based on previous Harry Adams landscape oil paintings. Photographs of the earlier paintings were bitmapped and converted to silk-screens, transforming the works into cut-ups that could be overlaid and reconfigured. These were made during lockdown and shown in an online exhibition COLLIDER part 1 (the exhibition).
This in turn lead on to COLLIDER part 2 (the book) double vision where the screen- print paintings were digitally manipulated: inverted, reflected and zoomed in on for a book that can be viewed “frontways, backways, in a mirror or on a Zoom call”. The only words in the book are taken from a response to the images by a Native American, writing from her own cultural and spiritual perspective; citing her experiences at the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests and indigenous people’s relationship to water and nature.
The ‘double vision’ works in this book then formed the starting point for the large-scale paintings made for COLLIDER part 3 (an installation).
Conceived of and made during periods of lockdown, this exhibition is deliberately staged to straddle the last days of current Covid-19 related restrictions. The bright white light of The Clinic with its high-powered ventilation system and wipe-clean surfaces provides a futuristically “Covid-safe” environment for all visits.