Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Adam Gordon
26
Floor 5
Born 1986 in Minneapolis, MN
Lives in Jersey City, NJ
To begin paintings like these, Adam Gordon makes a series of interventions in a physical space—construction, alterations, removals. He then paints extremely faithful images of the altered spaces. “From an early age,” he has said, “intuitively I became aware that spaces held something that I was sensitive to. Rooms hold residue—fetid air, a certain light, an attitude.” Gordon builds each composition on top of an underpainting, creating an “infrastructure” that he considers essential to the experience of the work, despite being unseen. The paintings react against the slick surfaces of contemporary technology and reflect Gordon’s investment in acts of attention, encounter, and emotion.
Untitled, 2022
Adam Gordon, She throws children into the world, 2022. Oil and acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist; Chapter NY, New York; and ZERO. . ., Milan. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
-
0:00
Adam Gordon, She throws children into the world
0:00
Narrator: Gordon creates much of his subject matter by constructing spaces, depicting mundane scenes that we might not think are deserving of the hours of observation he devotes to them. Though painting is only one portion of his practice, for his Biennial contribution he meticulously painted hyperrealistic surfaces in multiple layers. This fascinated the Biennial curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards. Here’s David Breslin.
David Breslin: We were really drawn to Adam Gordon’s paintings because of the way that he makes places that seem deeply uncanny, really weird. He’s pointing to the fact that so much of what we’ve inherited, and see, and live with every day is weird enough as it is. And to take the time to make a painting, to lavish this much attention on something found that he sees, that he finds on the internet, that he slightly changes in his own environment, to pay attention to the oddity of what already is, feels like a very profound gesture about how odd our time is, and how surreal it is, and how we don't necessarily need to skew it too much to acknowledge that.