PRESENTATION: Adam McEwen

Adam McEwen’s work resides somewhere between the celebratory and funereal. After writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph in London, he began producing obituaries of living subjects such as Bill Clinton and Jeff Koons, highlighting the blurred line between history and fiction. In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, Adam McEwen has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present. Adam McEwen in his first solo exhibition in Asia presents a cross section of his work, including new paintings as well as sculptures made in graphite, a material with which he is closely linked. McEwen’s practice tends to foreground and isolate banal objects (a yoga mat, a drinking fountain, plastic cups) to the degree that they become unstuck from their familiar, reassuring meanings. His sculptures in graphite or cast iron, for all intents and purposes straightforward and accurate renditions, suggest a sense of the uncanny and a feeling of slight displacement. Similarly, his recent paintings present everyday things in a simplified graphic language that decontextualizes them, freeing them from their usual connotations. The subjects are chosen for no other reason than that, for McEwen, they seem to hold some import: a railway arch near his studio, a drawing of a lion that symbolizes power and strength, a pair of street lamps near Grand Central Station in New York that form a kind of entranceway, a sword found hidden behind a radiator when the artist renovated his apartment. By simplifying their depiction, these subjects become accessible and the relationship between subject and viewer becomes stronger and more charged than the one between the subject and its everyday meaning.

Photo: Adam McEwen, Lion/Portal, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 57 x 1 1/2 inches (182.9 x 144.8 x 3.8 cm), © Adam McEwen, Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 2/2-9/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com/