Whitney Biennial 2022:  Quiet as It’s Kept | Art & Artists

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.