NYAB Event - Adam Bateman "Greener Pastures or The Effect of Imposing a Modern Aesthetic on a Traditional Landscape"

Adam Bateman "Greener Pastures or The Effect of Imposing a Modern Aesthetic on a Traditional Landscape"

hpgrp gallery

This event has ended.

Bateman graduated with an MFA from Pratt Institute in 2003 and has subsequently exhibited his work widely across the United States and has had two solo exhibitions in Iceland. He has received press coverage in the New York Times, Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, Hudson Reporter, Iceland¹s Morgunbladid, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. In addition to his art, he works as a freelance curator for the Central Utah Art Center and he is the director of Birch Creek Residency, an artist residency program in Utah.

Bateman¹s work resides between the ideal and the self-conscience, the transcendental and the modern. Understanding the contrast between the transcendence associated with early American landscape painting and the then new industrialized world with which the Modernists were dealing he is able to focus on tradition, both personal and art historical, and also formal concerns.

Growing up in rural central Utah in a predominantly Mormon community Bateman developed a strong and deep connection to the pastoral and the Divine. With intimate and first-hand knowledge about man's ability to tame the land and to transform what is a "high desert" environment into a producing and useful space Bateman adds a personal layer of understanding and draws a connection between the rhetoric of transcendence found in both early American landscape painting and modernism.

Bateman¹s work utilizes materials that call back to his youth; sprinkler pipes, couplings, risers, rain birds, wheels and pipes. Using readily available materials found in his landscape Bateman is able to focus on the formal aspects of his media. Linear sculptures that create three dimensional spatial drawings and repetitive shapes that twist in space creating
beautiful spiraling forms that fit within a Modernist context.

By creating new visual landscapes imbued with personal and cultural meaning the work re-asserts itself into a dialogue that ties traditional landscape painting and Modernism together establishing a new art rhetoric of conceptual-formal-craft rigor.