GR Gallery will open its doors to ‘Cerberus’, the first exhibition of Adam Lupton with the gallery and in New York. A total of 18 oil and acrylic paintings will be shown; this body of Lupton’s work grows out of his OCD, where performing mental and physical rituals, endlessly seeking assurance, and repeating mantras and projections make up his every day – mediating between himself and an unyielding “otherness”. Through this lens, the work weaves together individual and societal rituals, spiritual schizophrenia, and self-defining myth, thereby illuminating our various attempts at and desires for certainty.
These overlaps spill into narratives that play out on the canvas – borrowing their basis from Greek myths, religious rituals, rock lyrics, modern dating plights, domestic routines, history, introspection, sexuality, and compulsions – evocatively casting the contemporary world of individual and societal anxiety and isolation.
Adam Lupton (°1987, Vancouver, Canada) currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Adam Lupton’s work teeters between the emotional and the pictorial. By mining personal and collective assumptions and hollowing out culturally potent symbols and mythologies, he explores individual and societal anxiety and isolation. In approaching a range of layered themes and narratives, Lupton aims to eliminate prescriptive visual outcomes. Subjects are often given antithetical functions and signifiers are emptied of conventional signification, destabilizing the affect of form and content. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, Lupton attempts to reconsider and restructure the way viewers negotiate their reality and ideology by troubling both visual representation and emotional interpretation. For some, Lupton’s work divulges more than is expected, for others not enough. One experience may be unpleasantly full, while the other is painfully vacant.
Opening reception: Wednesday October 14th, 5:00pm – 9:00pm ET (Exhibition Dates: October 14 – November 14, 2020). The artist will attend the opening event and members of the press can contact GR gallery in advance to schedule a private viewing and an interview with the artist. RSVP is required for the vernissage and attendance will be regulated according to updated New York City health care guidelines. Reserve a Time.
GR Gallery is located at 255 Bowery, NYC