Introduction: Barbara Auer, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen
Bernhard Knaus Fine Art is pleased to announce the second solo show with Adam Thompson entitled “Benign neglect”. Thompson works across a variety of media including photography, sculpture and installation. Using found imagery and objects as material and reference, works are blackened, bleak meditations on time and existence. Navigating a tradition of landscape and romanticism, Thompson courts the dead and distant. His photographic works are carved through in an act of measured violence inflicted on the artwork, excavating the gallery walls. His sculptures of the fabric of the universe make us feel puny and meaningless. Thompson’s work inhabits the uneasy space between nihilism and truth. Thompson’s objects are suffused with an atmosphere of melancholy and loss. While works appear minimal, they have a precision, a robust structural relationship to each other, which makes them belong to a permanent now. The slightest gesture, here, speaks of a rich emotional landscape that the viewer does not so much perceive with cool detachment as participate in by assembling it in their own mind. Adam Thompson’s work challenges us to examine what we see and to notice qualities that are not immediately apparent. Investigations into the material and immaterial, surface and space, result in works subtly balancing the literal and the illusory.