Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, is pleased to present David Adamo. This is the gallery’s third exhibition with the artist and continues to build on important series and ideas that were the focus of the artist’s first solo museum show in 2015 at Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York).
A process of slow removal is central to Adamo’s sculpture. Objects from everyday life take on new forms, revealed by their remains: the fruit after it has been bitten, the balloon after the air has run out. These remnants are cast in various materials, including bronze, plaster, and aluminum. The same is true of Adamo’s wood works—the eventual forms have emerged through the reduction of material.
In 2011 Adamo exhibited in a deconsecrated medieval church, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, Italy. He was allowed to take an unused oak beam from the Baroque renovation of the church. He has since carved much of the mass of wood, reducing it to many toothpick-like slivers that he will line up end to end in this exhibition, in a sense rebuilding the deconstructed beam. Also on view is a new series of vessel-like works, carved from red cedar (historically used in the making of totem poles) with an adze—a physically engaging way of working, so that the resulting sculptures retain the sense of the body at work. Adamo will also show here for the first time a totem fully covered in roofing nails, the harsh material looking like a protective armor for the wood underneath.
Also essential to Adamo’s work is the imprint of action, palpable and, one senses, incomplete—as though a process has been initiated and could resume at any moment. 100 silent metronomes is an homage to the composer György Ligeti (Hungarian, 1923-2006) and his 1962 Poéme symphonique. Ligeti’s score calls for 100 metronomes, all fully wound, to be set to various speeds and left to play until running out of stored energy. Adamo’s version reduces the metronomes to their physical shape. Missing the mechanisms that make noise and keep time, they imply sound and rhythm within silence.
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1979, David Adamo has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2015), Mendes Wood, Sao Paolo (2013), MD72, Berlin (2013), Bielefeld Kunstverein (2012), Ibid Projects, London (2012), and Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, in Bergamo (2011). The artist has also participated in many significant group exhibitions, including Some schools are cages and some schools are wings, Museo de Arte de Rio, Rio de Janiero (2014-2015), Material World at Denver Art Museum (2013), Based in Berlin organized by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011), No Sense of Place at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011), The Whitney Biennial, New York (2010), and Greater New York at MoMA P.S.1, New York (2010).

A reception for the artist: Friday 26 February from 6 to 8 pm.

mpefm USA art press release