ADAM GORDON

Pushing the boundaries between reality and fiction, Gordon disrupts the mechanisms that customarily govern the art viewing process by creating haunting environments that challenge our inherent desire for a defined narrative.

Early Years

Gordon was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2011, he received his MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, prior to which he completed a BFA at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Connecticut and an International Summer School Program at the University of Oslo, both in 2008.

Adam Gordon Artworks

By crossing unexpected social boundaries and delving into unseen, often psychologically charged spaces—whether reproducing physical locations in his paintings or creating them himself—Adam Gordon’s work focuses on the construction of experience.

Installations

For The Grey Room (2018), his solo exhibition at the Power Station in Dallas, Gordon constructed a series of dimly lit installation spaces. Becoming increasingly dark and claustrophobic, the rooms were sparsely populated with unidentifiable forms and imbued with specific scents, developed by the artist with the help of a perfumer. The exhibition was marked at the entrance with a disclaimer to visitors, who were warned to access the space ‘at their own risk’ and one at a time.

In 2017, Gordon installed an inaccessible and vaguely menacing room with a rust-stained floor in the booth of his New York gallery, Chapter NY, at Art Basel Miami Beach. Walled off from the public with clear Plexiglas and devoid of any interior activity, the space was infrequently activated from the exterior by an ominous, lurking woman who would silently slip away as suddenly as she appeared.

Paintings

Many of Gordon’s paintings are based on banal photographs of blank building facades, empty interiors, and looming thresholds. The paintings in his 2017 solo exhibition, Mall Passer, at Chapter NY in New York are a good example of this, depicting a bright oblong of sunlight against a white wall in one canvas or the faint reflection of cars in an opaque glass door in another. While the resulting studies are meticulous enough to pass as photographs themselves, there is a certain haziness to the images that suggests that the artist’s primary interest might be the qualities of light.

Awards and Accolades

In 2011, Gordon received the George R. Bunker Award for excellent work in his department at the Yale University School of Art.

Exhibitions

Adam Gordon’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Selected solo exhibitions include The Large Lady, Gandt, New York (2022); Bald Woman, Project Native Informant, London (2021); Adam Gordon, Galleria ZERO, Milan (2020); and The Grey Room, The Power Station, Dallas (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Time Is Thirsty, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); and Gubbinal, curated by Sean Steadman, Project Native Informant, London (2019).

Fay Janet Jackson | Ocula | 2022