David Adamo
dal 2/4/2014 al 27/5/2014
Segnalato da
2/4/2014
David Adamo
Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Bruxelles
For his first solo exhibition at the gallery, the artist unfolds an emergent domestic scene through an unlikely cast of sculptural characters.
Galerie Rodolphe Janssen is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by David Adamo (b. 1979 , USA).
David Adamo is very much a sculptor, one with an acute awareness of the materials he uses, and the experiences that have led him to them. He is also a father, one who must negotiate the unfamiliar territory of home life as he is confronted by his own childhood memories.
For his first solo exhibition at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Adamo unfolds an emergent domestic scene through an unlikely cast of sculptural characters. Termite mounds, radiators, tin ceiling tiles, and carved carpets interact, giving playful hints as to their narrative through the material experimentation and paradoxical juxtapositions that build them.
A lingering sense of personal experience ties Adamo’s sculptures - and the materials they’ve been re-formed in - together. It is, for example, from his grandfather, who made a living from engraving names and images into them during the 1950’s, that his interest in carving carpets developed. Re-cast radiators and tin ceiling tiles, meanwhile, drum up images of Adamo’s earlier days in New York; these two objects are often all that’s left when a room has been emptied of its personal touches on move-out day.
Like the fading memories that inform Adamo’s formal choices, the scale and purpose of his works are often distorted. The homes of the magnetic termite are in reality uncannily huge - a testament to the laborious resolve of tiny critters. In Adamo’s reprisal of their shapes, the mounds have been scaled down to a more manageable, oddly human size, and yet the exertion involved in their making remains viscerally present. His radiators receive a similar treatment. Utterly commonplace, cast-iron radiators come in a variety of sizes, but here their proportions are exaggerated, as if made to fit the perspective of a small child.
Central to David Adamo’s practice is his relationship to form and function. His radiators are carved and cast in impossible materials - beeswax and balsa wood - so as to remove their function by virtue of their material. The mass-produced nature of cast-iron radiators is further subverted by the meticulousness of Adamo’s process; balsa wood is carefully cut and stacked together to reproduce the radiator’s familiar form. The treatment of his carved carpets similarly subverts the original intention of the craft; rather than demarcate their surface with delicate decorative patterns and words, the lines Adamo carves are gestural, recalling a tactile relationship to the body more than to interior design.
About the artist
David Adamo (born 1979 in Rochester, USA) lives and works in Berlin. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Peter Freeman, New York; CAPRI in Dusseldorf, Germany; Galerie Nelson - Freeman, Paris; MD72 in Berlin, Germany; IBID Projects, London; Mendes Wood Gallery, Sao Paulo; and Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld.
OPENING & FRENCH FRIES PARTY 03.04.2014
Galerie Rodolphe Janssen
Rue de Livourne 35 Livornostraat — 1050 Brussels — Belgium
Open
Tuesday to Friday 10:00 > 18:00
Saturday 14:00 > 18:00