Adam McEwen
Hometown: England
Education:
BA English Literature, Christ Church, Oxford, England, 1987
About The Artist
Often working with text-based imagery, Adam McEwen takes familiar formats and flips them on their ends with unexpected content. By manipulating these items of the everyday — from New York Times obituaries to opening/closing signs and text messages — his works spark confusion and surprise prior to understanding. The artist's frequent use of celebrities as his subjects, meanwhile, recalls the Pop art of Andy Warhol, excavating our obsession with a media-dominated culture.
Prior to his art career, McEwen worked as an obituary writer for The Daily Telegraph. As an artist, he gained attention by selecting living celebrities — Kate Moss, Jeff Koons, and Bill Clinton, to name a few — and writing their obits, blowing them up and hanging them on the wall as art objects. The results, when viewed in an art environment, are disorienting. It is this initial reaction that McEwen finds fascinating.
His work has been included in numerous group shows including Haunted at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2010), The Reach of Realism at the Miami MoCA (2009), Into Me/Out of Me at MoMA PS1, and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. He also curated Fresh Hell at the Paris's Palais de Tokyo, as the 2010 edition of the Carte Blanche series.
Galleries
Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, NY
Works by the Artist
