Adam Adach
chemical sunset
October 6 – November 3, 2007
Opening Reception: October 6, 6-8pm


D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with painter Adam Adach who lives between Warsaw and Paris. The exhibition will consist of canvases created during his three-month stay in New York, which opened up a new range of subject matter and a more accentuated subjectivity to his practice. Images drawn from newspaper clippings intertwined with personal snapshots and popular culture visual cues reinstate history to a dream like effect in Adach’s paintings.

The three large works in the show that make up the series Day After/Pelham Bay/ are based on Adach’s experience of an urban beach during low tide strewn with curved engines and corroded vessels. These relics give the scene an anti-utopian feel and act as points of departure for canvases based on events during WWI, Stalinist dictatorship, Nazi invasion of Europe, the Space Race, as well as more recent history.

The painting Enemies is based on a photograph from a French newspaper from WWI showing German marines diving off a cliff into the Adriatic Sea. The Rally documents a congress held by the extreme right political party in Poland after it assumed power in 2004. The circular composition is illuminated by blue light which gives the scene the feel of a science fiction movie. Here, as in other works, Adach filters a record of a historic event through visual elements of popular culture as well as his own subjectivity bringing the event into the present.


In 2007 Adam Adach had a solo show titled Portraits. Mirrors. at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland. A fully illustrated catalog was published in connection with the exhibition. In 2006 he was included in an exhibition Le Mouvement des Images at Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Adach has been nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2007.