Adam Helms

Asked about his references and his resources in a conversation with Bob Nikas in January of last year, Adam Helms (*1974), a student of Mel Bochner, pointed to a wide variety of sources: portraits from the mercenary magazine „Soldier of Fortune“, collages by John Heartfield, the opening credits of Paramount films, with their views of a giant mountain – the basis of the Paramount logo – differing only minimally from one another over many years, Gerhard Richter’s „48 Portraits“, that work for the Biennale von Venedig of 1972 which today hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Köln and brings together 48 black-and-white portraits of scholars and cultural figures since the Enlightenment, or the record sleeves of a noise label from Michigan bearing the fine name „Gods of Tundra“. In the medium of drawing, in pencil as well as charcoal, Adam Helms draws on the contemplation of such sources and for his part works on series of portraits, on landscapes or on poster walls devoted to historical themes. What interests him about these sources in particular is the manner in which individuals wish to see themselves, or their subject, represented; how the „unnameable“, and which typology, takes possession of these attempts at self-presentation. For Adam Helms this is the emotional point of entry: by fixing in his own work the pathos immanent in the sources, he penetrates those sources and is able to bring out the obsessions underlying them. Ultimately, he stresses, contemporary American art cannot do without propaganda; it is simply that in its quotations it refuses to acknowledge the status quo of American culture, the „spectacle of war“. He is therefore all the more interested in revealing the space where light and shadow meet, whether as primordial soup or in confrontation. The present volume presents Adam Helms’s works, in their barely diminished topicality, for the first time and comprehensively, in a sequence and form devised by the artist himself.

Exhibitions:
Grimm Gallery Amsterdam, 28/5 – 9/7/2011
Marianne Boesky Gallery New York, 7/9 – 5/10/2014