Adam Stamp

Working primarily with sculpture and drawing, Adam Stamp creates decidedly social installations which encourage playful engagement with audiences. Stamp has developed an ongoing series of sculptures which emulate bars and domestic spaces, such as Slippery Slope at Aspen Art Museum and the little meander at O Town House, Los Angeles. Repurposing everyday objects such as trolley carts, bricks or timber, Stamp crafts these weirdly wonderful environments with absurd neon hues and concrete colour. All at once disruptive and enticing, these installations blur normative boundaries between gallery sites and social spaces. By resituating familial objects, these spaces extract both the zany fragments of the everyday, and the quieter, sombre moments within our lives. Stamp’s drawings operate within a similar emotional plane. Whilst exploring his base of Los Angeles or travelling further afield, the artist will collect various casual detritus such as napkins, matchboxes or menus. These ephemera form the basis for Stamp’s drawings as he combines silkscreens inspired by these gathered materials with highly detailed drawings. Motel letterheads might sit in conversation with an illustrative drawing of a nineteenth century figure, or a cocktail menu will meet a renaissance era tableau. This blending of adversarial components with masterful craftsmanship echoes a Pop art aesthetic, yet the intimacy and raw emotion conveyed within Stamp’s work separates him from the more external perspective of his predecessors.