Harry Adams: A Short History of Our Progress Part Two

About

The artist Harry Adams is the collaborative expression of the artists Adam Wood and Steve Lowe. Adam and Steve have worked together for many years creating a body of work that they choose to present with a singular authorial voice. Harry Adams's work has included music, performance, photography, collage and montage, printmaking, graphic art, and crockery. Here, he is invoked as pure painter. Central to this exhibition is a series of paintings based on the photographic records of early polar exploration, in particular those of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Short shrift, however, is given to the specific exploits and heroics of Shackleton and his men. The images, instead, become re-imagined, isolated and removed from the security of their own narrative. The resulting paintings are elemental, raw, ‘three chord' inventions, as opposed to descriptive accounts. This reactive theme is continued in a companion series of paintings called the Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) paintings. These utilise, in tiresome repetition, a motif based on Tate Modern. Simplified to a kind of desexualized phallic symbol, or ‘up yours' gesture, they are always badly painted with varying degrees of ineptitude, but sometimes with surprisingly beautiful results. The exhibition also includes a series of cute puppies (at £50 a throw) painted from a litter born on Shackleton's Endurance expedition. Unfortunately, due to later necessity, they were shot and eaten by Shackleton and his men.