exhibition

Prairie

Adam King

24.Mar.06 - 15.Apr.06
Wed-Sun 12-6 or by appt

Contemporary Art Projects
20 Rivington St
London EC2A 3DU
020 7739 1743
info@caprojects.com
www.caprojects.com
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Adam King uses collage to create spatially ambiguous and timeless landscapes, which are both strange and familiar.

He appropriates images from consumer catalogues, guidebooks and lifestyle magazines to create a series of dimensions within a unified whole, a 'cosmology of worlds within worlds'. The scale, tones and patterns of the materials and images are manipulated to create the illusion of 3-D space and to build up volume and tactile surfaces.

King's landscapes teem with new life-forms spawned from parts of hair-dryers, vacuum cleaners and settees. Colours and tones suggestive of Paul Nash's battlefield paintings co-exist with phallic and amoeba-like forms reminiscent of those of Yves Tanguy.

Allusions to landscape painting, to surrealism, to notions of the pastoral and the sublime are filtered through the medium of contemporary print advertising, and this gives the work both its strange temporal ambiguity and its strikingly hyper-real character.

Adam King graduated in 2002 from Wimbledon School of Art with an MA in Drawing. He was short-listed for the Pizza Express Prospects Prize (2002) and won the Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Open Exhibition Prize (2002) and the Surface Gallery Print Open (2004). Recent group exhibitions include the 30th Bradley International Exhibition, Illinois, USA (2005). He is represented by Lounge.

The artist participates in the Fosterart Collection, an artist-owned body of work that is lent by Fosterart to public and private sector organisations with the aim of increasing access to high-quality contemporary art.